The catch is that it has to be the right kind of eye contact, i.e. eye contact which fits all the socio-cultural rules of the person/people youâre trying to have a conversation with. And the other catch is that nobody processes these things on a conscious level. These are all things that your brain learns to do without conscious input. Neurotypical people donât notice consciously when their conversation partner stops looking at their mouth and starts looking at their eyes, they just âknowâ the person wants to speak. When theyâre conversing with an autistic or some other neurodivergent person, or someone from another cultture, they will not consciously know what the disconnect is, but they will subconsciously know that the other person is not giving off the cues/signals they expect, and that something is âwrong.â Which, usually, they interpret as the other person being untrustworthy or something like that.
The thing is, because they donât consciously know what the cues are that their gut is expecting, they usually canât figure out why their gut thinks something is wrong. And they definitely canât teach anybody to use the cues âcorrectlyâ, because they have no idea what the cues are because none of this is on a conscious level. (And even if you could teach someone all the appropriate cues, theyâre very complex and culturally specific and pretty much impossible to do consciously while also doing things like âlisteningâ and âsaying coherent things.â)
Anthropologists and communications specialists have done a lot of studies about this kind of thing, btw, but they donât talk with autism researchers, and autism researchers donât go looking for this stuff in other fields.
So your ordinary allistic parent/teacher/therapist will know thereâs something ânot rightâ with an autisticâs nonverbal communication. If the autistic doesnât look a person in the face, it is very obvious that they are not making eye contact, so hey, voila! That must be the problem! So the allistic (who doesnât know how the fuck their own nonverbal cues work, but knows theyâre right and the autistic is wrong) tells the autistic to âmake eye contactâ as if staring into someoneâs eyeballs is the only thing that matters. The autistic person will comply with the command given, and make eye contact. But because itâs not the right kind of eye contact, the allistic will get uncomfortable and/or mad and accuse them of being defiant or aggressive or mocking or something like that, leaving the autistic very frustrated because they did what they were told and now theyâre being attacked for it by the very person who told them to do it.
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