What's in a Glance?

Two students separately enter a room and take facing seats at a table. But neither knows the other is there; an opaque screen three feet high stands between them, obscuring the view. All that each student has been told is that he will meet someone and be expected to carry on a conversation with him. All that is known about the students, as the result of previous psychological testing, is that one is more dominant a personality than the other. Abruptly, the screen is lifted, and the students confront each other across the table. Will the dominant or the submissive one avert his eyes first?

The answer, as determined by tests at England's Exeter University: the dominant subject. It is his way of signaling to another person that he is about to claim the floor, which in most cases he proceeds to do. The signal is invariably accepted by the submissive one. Behavioral scientists have long recognized the signal, as well as its application in settling the dominance issue between two strangers. But the recent Exeter experiment, conducted by Psychologist Brian Champness and reported before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, added an unexpected new dimension to this common behavior pattern.

Ten Subjects. Simply stated, it is that humans can instantly assert their place in any hierarchy by the exchange of a single glance. Champness' experiment involved ten students, five male and five female, none known to each other. In the course of the experiment, each was confronted on separate occasions with each of the other nine. Their dominant-submissive ratings had been previously established, and Champ-ness was interested in seeing to what degree their reaction would confirm the pattern. The results fascinated him. He used a scale in which 1 equals a perfect hierarchy (everyone knows whom he dominates and who dominates him) and 0 equals no hierarchy at all (nobody knows his place). On that particular scale, Champness' group of subjects rated .8, which means that in most cases their dominance or submissiveness to each of the others could be established at a glance.

That is nearly as high as hens (.9), which forge their chains of command in a way that has become a behavioral cliché—the pecking order. But it was accomplished in considerably less time than chickens normally take. The applications seem endless: say, in replenishing command vacancies in governments and armies, in selecting the properly submissive evening companion from a cocktail-party crowd or in determining ahead of time whether you or your opponent is likely to have the upper hand in a debate.