Interpersonal invisibility requires two people. Sometimes I wish to be invisible, sometimes I do not. When dealing with others, I sometimes choose to make them invisible and sometimes choose to make them visible. These choices can be both conscious and unconscious. What sorts of reasoning, bias, and interactions affect the state of invisibility?

It all started with a dream. I was seated at a table talking with two men about raising children. I didn’t know either of them well, having just met them both. I was still uncertain of their names but was rehearsing them as best I could. A third man (who I had met before) walked in with his wife and sat down at the table to my right. I was uncertain of his name but did my best to do introductions. The conversation resumed, and soon enough a fourth man (let’s call him Eric, who I also knew somewhat) and his wife sat down at the table to my left but I didn’t break from the conversation with the others. He remained until the conversation participants got up to leave a few minutes later. As Eric and I were leaving, I realized that Eric was in a wheelchair, and the results of my actions had made him invisible.

Why did I make my choice? My fear was that I has slighted him due to his use of a wheelchair, and that for those first moments of entry, Eric was invisible to me. Most importantly I had no idea why I chose to leave him invisible as the conversation went on.

Eric needn’t have stayed invisible. He could have injected himself into the conversation, he could have chosen to sit somewhere else. He had in fact chosen to remain invisible. Perhaps because he preferred to be invisible in that conversation, perhaps because he was hoping the topic would change to something more interesting. Perhaps he was responding to some queue from me. It was hard to know why he stayed quiet, so I asked him. And I then woke up.

Is there a series of social experiments that could tease out the conscious and unconscious drivers for this two-way state of social invisibility? If I could devise such experiments, it might be possible to connect with an academic interested in making them happen.

Here is a discussion by Neel and Lassetter of invisibility from the perspective of the perceiver (the person who decides whether another person is visible or invisible to them). Neel and Lassetter discuss invisibility as a type of stigma that occurs when the perceived (called the “target”) is neither useful or an impediment to the goals of the perceiver. They apply the ideas of “affordance management” to the phenomena of invisibility.

They discuss the idea that targets exhibit “cues” that indicate their level of utility to the perceivers. The cue examples cited by Neel and Lassetter, such as signs of illness, are not being controlled by the targets. They discuss targets changing from invisible to visible by revealing some capability relevant to the perceiver. The example given was what happens when a doctor self-discloses during an emergency situation.