By way of providing further evidence for the uselessness of psychology, Dalrymple writes at Taki’s Magazine on new psychological research that shows that people often become uncomfortable when someone makes prolonged eye contact with them. Is there anyone who doesn’t already know this? Dalrymple’s own description of this fact, gleaned from nothing more than his personal experience, seems far more informative, as well as entertaining:
…looking someone in the eye for too long is often taken as aggressive or intimidating. Fights in bars frequently result from too-prolonged eye contact, which is often interpreted, especially in a macho world, as a challenge. Women, too, are becoming more macho, at least in England: I remember one of my first patients at the hospital in which I spent the last fifteen years of my career was an aggressive young woman who described her behavior in the pub the night before she consulted me in words that I did not at first understand: “She was blazing me so I glassed her.”
This meant that a female in the pub was staring into her eyes with an intensity and length that she took to be menacing, or as a challenge that it would have been feeble to refuse, so she broke a glass and pushed the broken jagged end of it into her face. I have known murders caused by too-prolonged eye contact.