Another, more complex mode of nonverbal “conversation” has to do with dominance. Nonhuman primates actually maintain fine distinctions along that dimension; they have precise dominance hierarchies, something like the ranks in the army. Without the pretty insignias, though, one might wonder how a chimp knows whom to salute. Dominant primates pound their chests and use voice and other signals to indicate their high rank. One way a chimp can signal its acknowledgment that it is lower in rank, as I said, is to smile. Another is to turn around, bend over, and moon its superior. Yes, that particular behavior, though still practiced by humans, seems to have changed its meaning somewhere along the road of evolution.
In modern human society, there are two kinds of dominance.29 One is physical dominance, based on aggression or the threat of aggression. Physical dominance in humans is similar to dominance in nonhuman primates, though we signal it differently: it is the rare chimpanzee who announces his dominance, as some humans do, by carrying around a switchblade or a .357 Magnum, or by wearing a tight muscle shirt. Humans, however, can also achieve another kind of dominance: social dominance.
Social dominance is based on admiration rather than fear and is acquired through social accomplishment rather than physical prowess. Signals of social dominance—like wearing a Rolex or driving a Lamborghini—can be just as clear and overt as the chest-pounding a male baboon might display. But they can also be subtle, such as declining any conspicuous display of affluence by showing up unexpectedly in torn, faded nondesigner jeans and an old Gap T-shirt, or by refusing to wear anything with a logo on it. (Take that, you silly Prada and Louis Vuitton bag toters!)
Humans have many ways indeed of signaling “I’m the general and you’re not” without mooning or wearing a shoulder patch with stars on it. As in other primate societies, gaze direction and stare are important signals of dominance in human society.30 For example, if a child looks away while the parent is scolding, the adult might say, “Look at me while I’m talking to you!” I’ve said that myself on occasion, though since you don’t hear with your eyes, the demand seems to serve no functional purpose. The interaction is really about the parent’s demand for respect—or in primate language, dominance. What the adult is really saying is Stand at attention. Salute. I am dominant, so when I speak, you must look at me!
We may not realize it, but we don’t just play the gaze game with our children; we play it with our friends and acquaintances, our superiors and subordinates, when we speak to a queen or a president, to a gardener or a store clerk, or to strangers we meet at a party. We automatically adjust the amount of time we spend looking into another’s eyes as a function of our relative social position, and we typically do it without being aware that we are doing it.31 That might sound counterintuitive, because some people like to look everyone in the eye, while others tend to always look elsewhere, whether they are speaking to a CEO or the guy dropping a pack of chicken thighs into their bag at the local grocery store. So how can gazing behavior be related to social dominance?
It is not your overall tendency to look at someone that is telling but the way in which you adjust your behavior when you switch between the roles of listener and speaker. Psychologists have been able to characterize that behavior with a single quantitative measure, and the data they produce using that measure is striking.
Here is how it works: take the percentage of time you spend looking into someone’s eyes while you are speaking and divide it by the percentage spent looking at that same person’s eyes while you are listening. For example, if, no matter which of you is talking, you spend the same amount of time looking away, your ratio would be 1.0. But if you tend to look away more often while you are speaking than when you are listening, your ratio will be less than 1.0. If you tend to look away less often when you are speaking than when you are listening, you have a ratio higher than 1.0. That quotient, psychologists discovered, is a revealing statistic. It is called the “visual dominance ratio,” and it reflects your position on the social dominance hierarchy relative to your conversational partner. A visual dominance ratio near 1.0, or larger, is characteristic of people with relatively high social dominance. A visual dominance ratio less than 1.0 is indicative of being lower on the dominance hierarchy. In other words, if your visual dominance ratio is around 1.0 or higher, you are probably the boss; if it is around 0.6, you are probably the bossed.
The unconscious mind provides us with many wonderful services and performs many awesome feats, but I can’t help being impressed by this one. What is so striking about the data is not just that we subliminally adjust our gazing behavior to match our place on the hierarchy but that we do it so consistently, and with numerical precision. Here is a sample of the data: when speaking to each other, ROTC officers exhibited ratios of 1.06, while ROTC cadets speaking to officers had ratios of 0.61;32 undergraduates in an introductory psychology course scored 0.92 when talking to a person they believed to be a high school senior who did not plan to go to college but 0.59 when talking to a person they believed to be a college chemistry honor student accepted into a prestigious medical school;33 expert men speaking to women about a subject in their own field scored 0.98, while men talking to expert women about the women’s field, 0.61; expert women speaking to nonexpert men scored 1.04, and nonexpert women speaking to expert men scored 0.54.34 These studies were all performed on Americans. The numbers probably vary among cultures, but the phenomenon probably doesn’t.
Whatever your culture, since people unconsciously detect these signals, it stands to reason that one can also adjust the impression one makes by consciously looking at or away from a conversational partner. For example, when applying for a job, talking to your boss, or negotiating a business deal, it might be advantageous to signal a certain level of submission—but how much would depend on the circumstances. In a job interview, if the job requires great leadership ability, a display of too much submissiveness would be a bad strategy. But if the interviewer seemed very insecure, a pleasing display of just the right amount of submissiveness could be reassuring and incline that person in the applicant’s favor. A highly successful Hollywood agent once mentioned to me that he made a point to negotiate only over the telephone so as to avoid being influenced—or inadvertently revealing anything—through eye contact with the opposite party.
My father learned both the power and the danger of a simple look when he was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Weighing under a hundred pounds, he was then little more than a walking corpse. In the camp, if you were not being spoken to, locking eyes with one of your captors could spur rage. Lower forms were not supposed to make uninvited eye contact with the master race. Sometimes when I think in terms of the dichotomy between humans and “lower primates,” I remember my father’s experience, and the thin margin of extra frontal lobe that distinguishes civilized human from brute animal. If the purpose of that extra brain matter is to elevate us, it sometimes fails. But my father also told me that with certain guards, the right kind of eye contact could bring a word, a conversation, even a minor kindness. He said that when that happened it was because the eye contact raised him to the status of being human. But I think that by eliciting a human response from a guard, what his eye contact really did was raise the level of humanity of his captor.