Quora Answer: Why is Eye Contact Important in Public Speaking?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Why is eye contact important in public speaking?” 

Eye contact is important in any conversation, not just public speaking.  The more intimate the company, the more important eye contact is.  When speaking to a large audience, you do not actually make eye contact with them.  What we do is break up that audience into sections, and focus on individuals within each section.  When we start any speech, we have to understand that there is a distance between the speaker and the audience, a barrier.  During the course of the speech, the intent is to break that barrier, and make the audience feel that the speaker articulates their cares, their concerns, their passions.  Eye contact is one such tool. 

There are several reasons why we use eye contact, depending on the context of the speech we give, and the nature of the audience.  Generally, we want to evoke sincerity.  We must seem credible, and our contentions are sincere.  We make eye contact to connect with sections of the audience at an emotive level.  Their enthusiasm for or reaction to our points, thereafter, is contagious, and can be manipulated.  The larger the crowd, the lower the threshold of that contagion.  Sometimes, we make eye contact with members of the audience, especially the difficult sections of it, to demonstrate dominance.  You want to look them in the eye, and embrace that uncomfortable silence, until they look away.  This is a means to change the power dynamic of the discourse.  Eye contact is a tool of rhetoric, perhaps the most important tool.  It is a means to control audience reaction, and amplify emotions.