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Coronavirus Disease 2019
To See and Be Seen
In a time of “physical distancing” we can, if fleetingly, still connect.
Posted March 26, 2020
If you tally them all up, there must have been more awkward social moments so far this spring, as the coronavirus pandemic exploded, than in any other spring in the history of the world. People knew they shouldn’t shake hands, but after that, all bets were off. What to do instead? Bump elbows? Tap toes? “Physical distancing” — a.k.a. “the two-arm rule”— put all the chaos to rest.
Except it didn’t, because forcing humans to stay apart creates a different kind of anxiety. We are the most social of creatures. We need to connect.
Last week, Dr. Bonnie Henry, British Columbia’s health officer, showed Canada the way forward. Anyone she encounters now, Dr. Henry said, she simply looks in the eye and smiles.
That was the reassurance we needed:
You can still touch with your eyes.
The reminder could not have been more timely. Because increasingly — let’s place the beginning, oh, sometime between when Kellogg's offered a free box of Corn Flakes to any woman who would wink at her grocer, to the full cry of the MeToo movement — the whole issue of eye contact between strangers had become so fraught and dangerous and transactional, so open to misunderstood motives, that many people just decided not to risk it. Which is sad. Because to avoid eye contact is to turn away from maybe the thing that most makes us … us. As you pass fellow stricken souls on the way to the pharmacy or the grocery store or the gas pump, how can you not look into their faces? It’s where their stories are written.
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In 2010, the performance artist Marina Abromovic unveiled a piece called “The Artist Is Present.” The setup was simple. She’d sit in a chair, in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, opposite a second empty chair that visitors were invited to occupy. No talking allowed. The guests would simply install themselves there, facing Abromovic from just a few feet away, and meet her unblinking gaze, until they decided they’d had enough. The next visitor would then sit down for their own dose. Abromovic had no idea whether there’d be much public interest in any of this, she later admitted. But the crowds could hardly be contained. All day, every day, for three straight months, people cycled through, many of them moved to tears by the experience. “It was a complete surprise,” Abromovic later said, “this enormous need of humans to actually have contact.”
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But here is one of the deep contradictions of modern life: Our “enormous need” does not square with our actions. Long before this current pandemic hijacked our lives, we were suffering from another one — and this one will still be there long after COVID-19 is behind us and we’re clawing our way back to normalcy. It is the pandemic of loneliness, harder to measure but perhaps just as infectious, and certainly as toxic.
“Loneliness is one of the most aversive things that people feel in their lives,” as the UBC psychologist Liz Dunn put it. Yet given the opportunity to connect we actively avoid doing so, usually by hiding behind our phones.
It’s a riddle that pivots on a misunderstanding. The reason we don’t engage with strangers, studies show, is because we assume they’ll hate it. They'll think we’re mad, or trying to hit on them, or trying to sell them something — and they'll shut us down. But it turns out that's not true. Striking up a conversation almost always turns out better than people think, discovered Gillian Sandstrom, a psychologist at the University of Sussex in the UK. And both sides end up happier. But none of it gets off the ground without that initial, nonverbal eye-to-eye touch.
Not long ago, Columbia University psychologist Alexandra Horowitz was taking a walk through Manhattan with the artist Maira Kalman, while researching her book On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes. Kalman pointed out an absurdity. Here they were in the heart of a teeming city. People passing each other with inches to spare. Yet no one was interacting. No eye contact at all. They might as well have been cows. It was crazy. If people want to actually live, Kalman ventured, we need to be willing to see and be seen. Kalman struck up a conversation with a security guard, until his shields came down. As the women continued on their way, Horowitz looked back, and through the window she could see the guard’s eyes following them. She had to marvel. "Gaze and eye contact are the simplest of acts,” she writes. “But they sit squarely at the centre of our advanced social intelligence. There’s a reason we can imagine others’ perspectives, have empathy, infer others’ goals, communicate. And it begins with a shared gaze.”
The film producer Brian Grazer had a somewhat similar “flashpoint moment” recently when he suddenly connected the dots of his career. He’d found a common theme, from the plots of the movies themselves to the selling of skeptical executives on their potential. “I thought, Oh my god, none of these movies — whether A Beautiful Mind or 8 Mile — ever would have happened without the bridge of eye contact. Just looking at someone in the eyes. I want to see you and you want to see me. We’re opening our minds up to each other, even if just briefly.”
But this too must be said: There are social norms around what's actually comfortable, gazewise. A shared glance can quickly curdle if it's held too long. The line between welcome eye contact and unwelcome staring – call it the “creepy” threshold — is just over three seconds, studies show. Unless there’s agreement on both sides about what’s going on (a la Marina Abromovic, or the “eye gazing” parties springing up around the world), an overlong gaze can detonate. And just like that, the smiling gentleman looking at you across the cheese dip morphs from Mr. Rogers to Ted Bundy.
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Solid eye contact is pretty much required to pay attention. And paying attention is arguably the moral obligation of every good citizen. When we fail to look at each other, we sever the connection between us, thereby short-circuiting the impulse to help, maintains Vancouver-based psychologist Jessica Motherwell McFarlane. “If your eyes are on your phone,” she told me recently, “then you’re not going to be of service to someone who just walked off the curb.”
In a class she teaches at the Justice Institute of British Columbia, Motherwell McFarlane tones up her students’ attentiveness muscles with an exercise called “Waking up to Faces.” It’s a kind of scavenger hunt. But instead of collecting things, you collect people. The list might include someone with blue eyes. Or someone with an almond-shaped face. Or someone whose eyebrows curl down, like quotation marks. Succeeding at this game requires focusing your attention right into the wheelhouse of strangers — until you become a kind of connoisseur of the human face, alive to human need, by habit.
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If Grazer is right that eye contact is a bridge across which trust travels, a bridge that connects people at something like the level of the soul, how could you ever prove it? Well, consider what happens when the bridge is out.
In 2012, Purdue University psychologist Eric Wesselmann and some colleagues devised an experiment to study what it does to people when their glance isn’t returned — the non-verbal equivalent of a failed high five. Researchers fanned out across the Purdue campus, in Lafayette, Indiana. They chose random strangers, whom they lumped into three experimental conditions. One group received neutral eye contact from a passing experimenter. A second group got eye contact plus a smile. But the third group received the booby prize: The experimenter, as she passed, sent a glance that just missed, as if she were looking not at them but kind of through them.
A research assistant chased down the strangers in that last group. “Within the last minute," they were asked, "how disconnected do you feel from others?” They reported they felt more disconnected than the subjects in the other groups. Not just disconnected from the stranger who had ghosted them, but from humanity in general. When you withhold eye contact, it turns out, you deliver a little icy sliver of existential loneliness into the heart of a stranger.
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In September of 2000, Kevin Hines was a 19-year old college student suffering from bipolar issues. On one particularly black day, he boarded a bus headed for the Golden Gate Bridge. He was openly crying as he sat there, chugging toward his destination. He didn’t really want to die. Indeed, he was aching to be talked out of his plan. He kept silently hoping one of the commuters around him would notice the tears and do something, ask him what was wrong, even just look him in the eye. But no one did. So he jumped off the bridge.
And miraculously survived.
Hines has since become a speaker on mental health issues and suicide prevention. In a film based on his life, Hines implores people who are feeling suicidal to seek help. But he also reminds the rest of us to keep an eye out for strangers who look like they might need it.
This kind of work continues elsewhere. In one ongoing project in the UK, sponsored by British Rail, volunteers are trained to watch for anyone on tube-station platforms who might be engulfed in self-destructive thoughts. And to engage them with a smile and a few words — specifically, four “life-saving questions.”
It’s the reaching out that seems to matter, the acknowledgement of these individuals’ existence. Says Ursula Whiteside, clinical psychologist at the University of Washington specializing in suicide prevention: “I think people die when they feel completely alone.”
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“Let me make it simple,” an influential blogger wrote recently, by way of shaking people out of their COVID-19 denial and urging them to just friggin’ stay in the house already. “When you get together with somebody, you're getting together with everybody who ever came in contact with them.” That’s true and important. But there’s a positive way to spin it if you expand your definition of what “getting together” means.
The ancient Sufis believed that when you meet the glance of a stranger there is an exchange of histories. Your “lineages” blend. They see everyone you ever loved and who ever loved you. And you see everyone they ever loved and who ever loved them.
When the COVID-19 nightmare is over and we emerge, blinking in the light, to resume our nonvirtual lives, and we pass each other again on the street, you now know what to do. Look into the eyes of a stranger and smile. This – this – is the original social media. Don’t ever forget it.
