>>76910187It IS opposite the instincts of our closest biological relatives, but so are a lot of things in human society.
As an autistic man myself, one who has struggled with eye contact in the past, the best rationalization I've come up with is that people generally interpret gaze direction as an indicator of attention. Now, they may do so incorrectly, but right or wrong, the natural instinct tends to be to think that the person is paying the most attention to whatever they're looking at.
As a result, looking at a person convinces them that you are paying attention to them. Which is good, I guess.
The problem then is how much is too much? Because every culture has such a thing as too much eye contact. If your eyes are just frozen, locked-on to the other person's eyes throughout the conversation, that can seem unnerving. So it's better to just sort of loosely scan their whole face every few seconds if you're in a long conversation, to diffuse the tension. Work a bit of neck and shoulder area in there too, so you don't come off like an NPC in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
An alternative is to learn how to work your hands into the way you talk. Work them in a LOT. Use your hands to emote and use them heavily. While this sort of emotive talking-with-your-hands thing is unusual outside of Italy, it's only moderately so, the kind of thing Seinfeld characters might talk about but not the kind of thing most people will think about or comment on. The best part is, while your hands are zipping all around, they'll often pull your audience's eyes away from your own, and they'll expect you to be looking at your own hands while you're doing this shit anyway, so as long as you can make eye contact during the lulls between gestures, you're good.
And if you don't sound like you've got quite the same accent as your peers, the hand trick might get some of them to think you're partially Italian and give you a pass.
