When Strangers Meet by Kio Stark

Author:Kio Stark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster/ TED

The Gaze

On the street, in public space, most of the time the goal is to avoid truly intruding on anyone, or frightening them, or causing them any unpleasantness. How do you know if someone is open to verbal contact or not? How do you show that you are or aren’t? The art of talking to strangers demands that we become deft readers of one another and skilled senders of clear messages.

Let’s go back to the eyes—this is where it all starts. The gaze is the core of human interaction. Meeting someone’s eye can be a powerful statement of openness and inclusion, or of desire or revulsion. Navigating the world of strangers starts with knowing what gazes mean.

In Goffman’s study, people who are open to interaction briefly bring their eyes back to their potential interaction partner as they come closer, and hold their eyes momentarily. This slightly prolonged glance is a question and an answer. Are you friendly? I am. It’s not a stare, which can be threatening and invasive and create a snake pit of negative feelings. An open glance is an overture and like any overture it can be rejected. The brevity of the glance lets you save face if it is. Rejection can look like the absence of acknowledgment, decidedly averted eyes, or a cold stare. Acceptance is an opening that can then be met with a nod, a smile, or a passing word.

Again, a reminder: the meaning of gazes varies widely among different cultures—direct eye contact is more common in the United States than, for example, in Japan, and in some cultures and situations direct eye contact is a challenge or an assertion of power. So Goffman’s description doesn’t apply universally. Gazes always signal something, but openness to interaction is just one thing a gaze can signal.

Our decisions—whether instinctual or conscious—about whether or not we’re going to make that gazing overture start with the information we get from our senses and our bodies. We notice the way people dress. We guess their age; we notice their apparent gender, the shade of their skin. We notice the angle of their shoulders, the expression on their face, the speed of their gait, and what they do with their hands. We take stock of their behavior and its appropriateness to the place and time of day. We listen to their tone of voice and make assumptions about their emotional states and personal facts from what we hear—nervousness, confidence, the gravelly laugh of a smoker, a foreign accent, or a familiar one. If we are physically close enough, we smell perfume and shampoo, we smell the sweat of labor or the sweat of fear. We interpret all these things. We decide who we might extend ourselves to and whose overtures we engage by interpreting all this information. We get context. And we use that to choose whom to extend ourselves to, whose overtures we respond to, who to trust with our bodily safety, with our social distance, with our time.

The gaze

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