Looking down during social interactions is an evolved survival mechanism in the brain that functions to signal submissiveness and avoid challenging higher-status individuals.
"Looking down constantly. Sometimes when people talk they do look down, look up, look down, look up. It is actually part of your evolutionary survival machinery in your brain because looking up and confidently asserts status and it scares you because it means you're challenging for that status. So people look down in order to tell who they're talking to like, "I am not of high status. Please do not consider me a challenger because I don't want to get beat up or whatever."" (said at 0:11:43)
Behavioral and neuro-evolutionary research supports the concept that gaze aversion functions as an implicit submissive display during social hierarchy and dominance interactions. Studies using eye-tracking demonstrate that direct gaze signals dominance and status challenge, whereas rapid gaze aversion away from confronting or threatening faces serves as a submissive response indicating subordination.
- supports: Integrating gaze direction and sexual dimorphism of face shape when perceiving the dominan… (Perception 2009)
"While faces with direct gaze were generally rated as more dominant than those with averted gaze, this effect of gaze direction was greater when judging faces with masculinised shapes than when judging faces with feminised shapes." (abstract, results, passage verified)
pubmedfull study (doi) - supports: Memory and attention for social threat: anxious hypercoding-avoidance and submissive gaze … (Emotion (Washington, D.C.) 2012)
"Rivalry for dominance is a recurrent challenge in human social interaction. During these social dominance interactions, some people rapidly break eye contact, whereas others merely try to avoid such eye-to-eye confrontations. The first is an example of submissive gaze aversion, whereas the second reflects anxious gaze avoidance." (abstract, passage verified)
pubmedfull study (doi) - supports: Testosterone abolishes implicit subordination in social anxiety. (Psychoneuroendocrinology 2016)
"Neuro-evolutionary theories describe social anxiety as habitual subordinate tendencies acquired through a recursive cycle of social defeat and submissive reactions." (abstract, passage verified)
pubmedfull study (doi)