Look me in the eye

The Art of Manliness has part 1 of a series today on the Importance of Eye Contact.

A valuable skill, for certain, but this is what caught my eye:

And actually, it’s probably something men have always struggled with—females are on average better at making and holding eye contact than males, and in fact, it’s been found that the higher the levels of testosterone a fetus is exposed to in utero, the less eye contact they make as infants—across genders. Interestingly, the exception to this rule are male babies who have the very highest levels of T; they end up being as adept at eye contact as their female counterparts—alpha babies aren’t afraid to look you in the eye!

Interestingly, I don't think this is an exception at all. It's a feature not a bug. For men, the reason it is hard to look another man in the eyes is it constitutes a challenge, and you have to be ready to back that up. I'm not actually making a sociobiological argument either, this is something I learned from my police officer taekwondo instructor. We were of course expected to look one another in the eyes in class, but we were warned what it meant to gaze steadily into another man's eyes on the street. There was a whole dance of eye contact we talked about, and how to read a man's intentions from his face.

Thus of course the men with the highest level of testosterone have the easiest time staring: they are already dominant, and they are just reminding you of that fact.