Dr. Alison Wood Brooks

One idea is going back to the asking, Maxim.

When you're in a group, you have these opportunities.

You can turn the attention to someone else very deliberately and say, Sarah, I'm

I wanted to hear about that basketball team you're coaching.

What can you tell us about that?

You are able to literally turn the entire group's attention to someone else and to a new topic so that that person cannot continue to dominate the conversation.

And that's what we're doing in groups.

We are all directing traffic.

We are stewards of the conversation, especially non-verbally, okay?

So we have some research about eye gaze in particular.

This is something high status people can do really, really well.

Human beings have a tendency to look with their eyes at the highest status members of the group.

You expect them to speak more, they do speak more, and you tend to look at them for their reactions.

This makes the low status people in the group feel invisible.

Because they literally are invisible.

Nobody's looking at them.

And it makes them feel like even when they have something great to say, they shouldn't say it.

They're not welcome to say it.

No one's inviting them to speak with their gaze.

So we ran experiments where we had leaders of a group very purposefully make more equitable eye gaze with everyone in the group.