This article originally appeared on 05.26.16
You'd be hard-pressed to find a place on Earth with more wall-based symbolism than Berlin, Germany.
But there, in the heart of Germany's capital city, strangers sat across from one another, staring into each other's eyes. To the uninitiated, it may look as though you've witnessed some sort of icy standoff. The truth, however, couldn't be more different.
This was about tearing down walls between people.
Image from Amnesty Poland.
Amnesty International recently released a video in which they show strangers breaking down barriers with the help of eye contact.
The refugee crisis is a contentious issue worldwide. Reasonable people can disagree about the right path forward in finding homes for people displaced by conflict or economic crisis. What's sometimes missing from this conversation, it seems, is empathy.
But what if we could inject some empathy into that debate? And what if it was as easy as making eye contact?
Refugees sat across from Europeans. In many cases, the two parties didn't even share a language; all they had was eye contact. The organization's theory? That it should be enough.
Image from Amnesty Poland.
The video's a powerful look at what it means to share in our common humanity. The eye contact bit? That comes from psychologist Arthur Aron.
Aron's 1997 study, "The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness," put forth the idea that a bond between two strangers can be created quickly through physical proximity and an exchange of specific personal information. In additional studies, Aron found that closeness and bonding can sometimes develop even more strongly through sustained eye contact.
In the nearly 20 years since publishing, Aron's work — which has often been presented in a sort of "here's how to fall in love in less than an hour" type of way — has seen a bit of an online resurgence and for good reason: It seems to work. Pretty neat, right?
Image from Amnesty Poland.
Refugees and borders aside, there are some related studies that have concluded roughly the same thing: Simply existing and interacting with other people can help you empathize with them.
For example, a 1997 study by Gregory Herek of the University of California at Davis suggests that straight people who personally know gay people are more likely to be accepting of gay and lesbian men and women. Further, the more gay people they know, the more likely they are to be cool about everything.
Photo by Burak Kara/Getty Images.
Basically, these studies confirm the old adage: It's hard to hate what you know.
If you personally know someone from a misunderstood group of people — whether that's based on refugee status, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or other often generalized factors — it's a whole lot harder to make sweeping statements about that group.
We've all got walls of our own that we wrestle with every day. What's important is that we're always working to tear them down.
So while you and I may not have been in that room in Berlin, there are almost certainly situations in which we, as a society, can benefit from making use of these same tactics in our own lives.
You can watch Amnesty International's video, "Look Beyond Borders," below.
Clarification 11/02/2017: This post was updated to clarify that Aron's 1997 publication did not explicitly discuss his research into eye contact.
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An Irish woman went to the doctor for a routine eye exam. She left with bright neon green eyes.
It's not easy seeing green.
Did she get superpowers?
Going to the eye doctor can be a hassle and a pain. It's not just the routine issues and inconveniences that come along when making a doctor appointment, but sometimes the various devices being used to check your eyes' health feel invasive and uncomfortable. But at least at the end of the appointment, most of us don't look like we're turning into The Incredible Hulk. That wasn't the case for one Irish woman.
Photographer Margerita B. Wargola was just going in for a routine eye exam at the hospital but ended up leaving with her eyes a shocking, bright neon green.
At the doctor's office, the nurse practitioner was prepping Wargola for a test with a machine that Wargola had experienced before. Before the test started, Wargola presumed the nurse had dropped some saline into her eyes, as they were feeling dry. After she blinked, everything went yellow.
Wargola and the nurse initially panicked. Neither knew what was going on as Wargola suddenly had yellow vision and radioactive-looking green eyes. After the initial shock, both realized the issue: the nurse forgot to ask Wargola to remove her contact lenses before putting contrast drops in her eyes for the exam. Wargola and the nurse quickly removed the lenses from her eyes and washed them thoroughly with saline. Fortunately, Wargola's eyes were unharmed. Unfortunately, her contacts were permanently stained and she didn't bring a spare pair.
- YouTube youtube.com
Since she has poor vision, Wargola was forced to drive herself home after the eye exam wearing the neon-green contact lenses that make her look like a member of the Green Lantern Corps. She couldn't help but laugh at her predicament and recorded a video explaining it all on social media. Since then, her video has sparked a couple Reddit threads and collected a bunch of comments on Instagram:
“But the REAL question is: do you now have X-Ray vision?”
“You can just say you're a superhero.”
“I would make a few stops on the way home just to freak some people out!”
“I would have lived it up! Grab a coffee, do grocery shopping, walk around a shopping center.”
“This one would pair well with that girl who ate something with turmeric with her invisalign on and walked around Paris smiling at people with seemingly BRIGHT YELLOW TEETH.”
“I would save those for fancy special occasions! WOW!”
“Every time I'd stop I'd turn slowly and stare at the person in the car next to me.”
“Keep them. Tell people what to do. They’ll do your bidding.”
In a follow-up Instagram video, Wargola showed her followers that she was safe at home with normal eyes, showing that the damaged contact lenses were so stained that they turned the saline solution in her contacts case into a bright Gatorade yellow. She wasn't mad at the nurse and, in fact, plans on keeping the lenses to wear on St. Patrick's Day or some other special occasion.
While no harm was done and a good laugh was had, it's still best for doctors, nurses, and patients alike to double-check and ask or tell if contact lenses are being worn before each eye test. If not, there might be more than ultra-green eyes to worry about.