Are You Looking at Me? Students Tend Not to Sit Facing Strangers

Abstract

Eye contact is associated with multiple human social functions. These include social dominance displays or contests and signaling interest in potential romantic partners, functions more prominent for men and women respectively. People may actively avoid situations that could create a dynamic of initiating social attention without further communication. We observed seating patterns in a university cafeteria during off-peak hours. We predicted that individuals arriving alone would avoid sitting facing others and that women would be relatively less likely to sit facing a male stranger than vice versa. Only 14% of individuals arriving alone sat directly facing another individual not at the same table, however we did not have an adequate number of cases to reliably test the second hypothesis. We believe that evolved mechanisms regulating social interactions explain this pattern; the goals of avoiding social conflict and unwanted sexual attention continue to be important in modern environments.