Any seasoned Christmas party attendee will know the feeling of being cornered near the tree by some bore blathering on about their imminent journey home for Christmas ('Yeah, a few junctions down the M4!') but there’s a way of getting out of those dull conversations.
Scientists have discovered that blinking - at length - helps signal, ever so subtly, to your conversational counterpart, that it’s time for them to back off. Research published in online journal Plos One found that blinking can find a subconscious purpose. Paul Hömke, from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, said: ‘I noted that the longer blinks seem to have a special role in signaling “message received”, being often timed with nods and the like’
In his research, he got 35 volunteers to have conversations with virtual avatars. The avatars asked them a bunch of open-ended questions, such as ‘How was your weekend? What did you do?’ And while the volunteers answered, the avatars would blink. Some avatars would blink for a fifth of a second, others would blink for two-thirds of a second. And the result was that those volunteers whose blathering on was met by a long blink would stop talking about whatever they were talking about a few seconds before those volunteers who were confronted by an avatar’s shorter blink. ‘Our findings show that one of the subtlest of human movements — eye blinking — appears to have a surprising effect on the co-ordination of everyday human interaction’ Hömke told The Times.
The conclusion is that, if you blink for longer, the boring mulled wine-breathy dingbat who’s followed you to the corner of the mince pie table, even though all of the mince pies are gone and it’s just a graveyard of crumpled up crimped bits of metal and a few crumbs that even the most over-worked reindeer wouldn’t sniff his red nose at, all so they can talk to you about a vaping convention they once went to, will stop gassing on about nonsense earlier. The best thing about this news is that deliberate blinks always last for longer than the involuntary blinks that we do as part of a reflex action to help lubricate our eyes.
That’s not the only way you can use blinks to your advantage. Previous research shows that, when talking to a liar, you can note they’ll blink less frequently than they do while telling the truth. Once the lie is deployed, they’ll then speed up to about eight times faster than usual!