And for the one who's being looked at, eye contact sends a message, signaling acknowledgment, connection, and attention, signaling something, I suppose, like empathy. Being seen is, on some level, being felt. It's nice to be acknowledged.

very nice Kore, I appreciate your clip...

Hooowah.. great clip Kore!

good clip, but i think eye contact is over-rated, eye contact, people watching or staring? ...stay tune for my list...

I almost clipped this part:

Eye contact is not the same as staring.

People don't like the dumb indifference of a stare. My first attempts at maintaining eye contact were so self-conscious that I took to picking a point on the person's face--as close to the eyes as possible--and gazing at it as calmly as possible. That was a disaster. I wasn't looking at people so much as I was at a blemish they happened to know very well.

If I stared at a point, say, between someone's eyes or at a mole just above an eyebrow, people knew it right away. I did this at a Smoothie King at the airport, and the girl behind the counter stood it for about seven seconds before she asked me, "What are you looking at?"

Wow, who knew there's a National Association of Staredown Professionals?
I thought this only existed in British series "Big Train", where there's a recurrent sketch on Stare-Out contests.