[tweets by enkiv2 quoted below (link to the topmost one in the thread that makes it easy to find all the others):
TBH, NTs don’t *know* social rules because they learned to follow them in a pre-conscious state. When you ask an NT to explain social rules, they explain them *wrong*.
Case in point: NTs think that people who are talking look each other in the eye.
If you actually do that, you come off as a creep.
Cognitive scientists used video & eye-tracking to figure out what *actually* happens. It’s a complicated pattern related to turn-taking.
What actually happens with eye movements during a conversation is:
1. the two people meet each other’s eyes only when switching roles (i.e., one person stops talking & the other starts) or when the speaker is emphasizing a point. The difference in the length of pauses.
2. the listener always watches the speaker’s face, but switches rapidly between eyes and mouth, for disambiguation of ambiguous phonemes
3. the speaker periodically checks where the listener is looking *without pausing* to gauge attention
If the speaker looks the listener in the eye for too long, it is interpreted as the speaker either having an extremely inflated view of the importance of what they’re saying or a selfish tendency to talk out of turn / talk too much, depending on how fast they talk!
In other words, if you do what an NT believes they are doing when speaking, you automatically come off as rude!]
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