Eye contact, public speaking and the case of President Zuma’s dark glasses

Having just watched Jacob Zuma being sworn in as South Africa’ new president (HERE), I was reminded of the importance of eye contact in holding the attention of an audience.

It wasn’t so much that he hardly looked up from the text, which was excusable given that the importance of getting the words right when reading out an oath, as the fact that he was wearing dark glasses at all.

Readers of my books will know that I regard some of the widely circulating claims about body language and non-verbal communication as being at best over-stated, and at worst false (e.g. see Lend Me Your Ears, Chapter 11). But eye-contact is definitely not one of these.

In fact, here’s what I wrote about the subject twenty-five years ago that bears on the case of President Zuma'a dark glasses:

‘.. humans are the only primate species in which the irises are framed by visible areas of whiteness, and it is generally considered that the evolutionary significance of this has to do with the communicative importance of our eyes: the whites of the eyes make it relatively easy for people to track even slight movements over quite large distances. An illustration of the importance of eye visibility for holding the attention of an audience is provided by an anecdote in the autobiography of the Oxford philosopher, A.J. Ayer (Part of My Life, 1977). He reports that, after sustaining a black eye as a result of bumping into a lamp post during a wartime blackout, he took to wearing dark glasses. He goes on to say that he subsequently found when lecturing in them that it was quite impossible to hold the attention of an audience. Given his reputation as an effective speaker, this suggests that the invisibility of a person's eyes can seriously interfere with his ability to communicate with an audience. It may therefore be no coincidence that there have been very few great orators who have worn spectacles, even with plain glass in them, when making speeches.’ (Our Masters’ Voices, 1984, pp.89-90).

There’s much more on why eye-contact is so important for effective public speaking in Lend Me Your Ears (pp.36-43), but an additional point about President Zuma’s choice of dark glasses is that it tends to make him look more like a South American dictator than a democratically elected president, an implicit association that he would presumably be quite keen to avoid.

All of which is to say that, if I were advising him, I’d definitely tell him to get some new glasses.

I'd also suggest that his aides should pay a bit more attention to camera angles and back-drops, because there's someone just behind him wearing a black bowler hat, the brim of which at times pokes out from the sides of the president's head - a seemingly trivial point perhaps, but I bet I'm not the only viewer who found it distracting.

Chicago!

A few days ago, I logged on to Expedia to book a flight from Detroit to Chicago, from where I was due to fly back to Heathrow. It didn’t take long and all seemed to go very smoothly - until, at Detroit airport, I discovered that I should have taken a bit longer and taken a bit more care.

So here are a couple of helpful tips for anyone who might ever have to book an internal US flight to Chicago and/or have the misfortune to fly out of Terminal 5 at O'Hare airport.

1. Unknown to me until yesterday, there are two big airports in Chicago, and I'd mistakenly booked a flight from Detroit to Chicago Midway to catch a Virgin flight to Heathrow. But Virgin flights go to and from Chicago O’Hare. Luckily, it’s only a 45 minute shuttle bus ride between the two of them and, even more luckily, I’d allowed so much time that I didn’t have to get into a serious travel flap. So, if you are booking a flight to or from Chicago, make sure you check which airport you need.

2. New and flashy though it may be, Terminal 5 at O’Hare must be the only airport in the world that has no restaurants, and precious little in the way of bar and shopping facilities, once you’ve passed through the security checks. The facilities are so minimal (a few mobile market stalls on wheels), that there’s no coffee or tea available, not even from a machine. Even more annoying is the fact that there are no notices warning you of this irritating fact before you start taking your shoes off and putting your other potentially hazardous belongings through the X ray machine.

So the moral of this part of the story is that, if you ever do have to pass through this miserable place, feeling a bit peckish or in the mood for some retail therapy, make sure you get it done before you go through security - though even then you'll still have the added stress of trying trying to work out whether you've allowed enough time to eat something, go shopping and get through the security checks before your plane leaves.

Weatherization

Reading an American newspaper today has taught me a new word, and it's another long one, to add to my collection.

Home weatherization seems to refer to what we British speakers of English know as home insulation.

A lot of dollars are being dished out to help people to do something about it - an optimistic sign, perhaps, that the new regime is taking global warming a bit more seriously than George W. Bush, whose position on the subject made about as much sense as Thabo Mbeki's ridiculous HIV/AIDS denial policy.