At some point in your life, chances are you’ve felt that prickle in the back of your neck suggesting somebody staring at you from across the room. And when we say “chances are”, we’re not exaggerating: various surveys over the years have placed the proportion of people reporting this feeling as anywhere between 68 and 94 percent.
It’s not a new phenomenon, either. The first scientific paper investigating the phenomenon comes from 1898: “Every year I find a certain proportion of students, in my junior classes, who are firmly persuaded that they can ‘feel’ that they are being stared at from behind,” reported Cornell psychology professor Edward Titchener, “and a smaller proportion who believe that, by persistent gazing at the back of the neck, they have the power of making a person seated in front of them turn round and look them in the face.”
But here’s the question: is this, you know… real? Can we actually sense when we’re being stared at by somebody hidden from view? And if so, how on Earth can we explain it?
First things first: can we actually feel people looking at us?
Let’s face it: if humans really could somehow “sense” when they were being looked at – particularly by somebody behind them or otherwise unseen – it would be very big news, tantamount to proving the existence of some kind of extra-sensory perception.
The fact that it’s still being discussed, therefore, means one of two things are true: either nobody’s done the research – or they have, but people haven’t liked the answer.
Well, we won’t keep you in suspense – it’s not the first option. There’s actually a surprisingly robust body of research into whether or not humans can magically tell if they’re being looked at, it’s just that the results have been… well, let’s say “mixed”.
“In 1912-1913, experimental research on staring detection was carried out by Coover at Stanford University,” reports a 1993 review of what authors William Braud, Donna Shafer, and Sperry Andrews – all noted proponents of parapsychology and pseudoscience – termed “remote attention” and “autonomic staring detection”.
However, “overall, the subjects’ accuracy of guessing did not depart significantly from chance,” the team admit. “Coover […] interpreted his findings as support for Titchener’s claim that the belief in staring detection was empirically groundless.”
A few decades later, experiments by Johannes Poortman – whose worldview can best be described as “interesting” – seemed to show the opposite: “In 1959, [he] reported a preliminary staring detection study in which he himself […] attempted to guess whether or not he was being stared at by another experimenter,” the trio explain. “Poortman achieved a 59.55 percent accuracy rate which he called ‘suggestive and highly promising.’”
Further experiments followed basically this pattern: skeptics would find no “remote staring” effect, while believers would find significant evidence for it. In one notable example from 1997, this held true even within a single experiment: the two investigators “used the same equipment, drew participants from the same subject pool and employed exactly the same methodological procedures,” the paper reports. “The only real difference between the trials was that one set was carried out by [parapsychologist Marilyn Schlitz], whilst the other set was run by [psychologist Richard Wiseman].”
That doesn’t make much sense…
No, it doesn’t. Clearly, something is awry in the study of this phenomenon – and it seems to hinge on who exactly is doing the investigation.
That’s not entirely surprising. “Such ‘experimenter effects’ are common within parapsychology and are open to several competing interpretations,” Wiseman and Schlitz pointed out. “For example, [Schlitz]’s study may have contained an experimental artifact absent from [Wiseman]’s procedure.”
Now, it’s worth pointing out that the pair do, somewhat generously, also allow for the possibility that Schlitz simply ended up with all the psychically gifted subjects, or that Wiseman was cheating for some reason. But most likely, it does indeed come down to some kind of failure in experiment design, with proponents of the effect setting up and carrying out their tests in different – and often less rigorous – ways.
“Doing science in a controlled and thoughtful manner is a challenging and tricky operation,” wrote David Marks and John Colwell in a 2000 article for the Skeptical Enquirer. “This is especially true of research on the paranormal, where the claims are difficult to prove because the effects are small and unreliable.”
For proponents of paranormal claims, they point out, this is often considered a strength. Being unconstrained by the dogma of traditional scientific biases and methodology may allow amateur investigators a “greater freedom to pioneer new areas of research”, parapsychologist and dog-telepathy guy Rupert Sheldrake suggested in 1994; “institutional science,” he claimed in contrast, “has become so conservative [and] limited by the conventional paradigms.”
Now, sure, there are certainly examples to be found of institutional science holding back world-changing discoveries based on deeply-held biases – just look at Barry Marshall and his ulcer soup for evidence of that. But overall, there’s a reason we like our scientists to have a decent background in, you know, science: “Will they randomize correctly?” ask Marks and Colwell. “Will they use double-blind controls? Will they prevent cueing? Will they use independent judges? Will they use proper statistical procedures? The questions go on and on.”
So, what’s going on, then?
Undoubtedly, there are some people reading this article who, despite everything we’ve said so far, are still more convinced by their experiences of feeling the hairs on the back of their neck prickle, turning around, and seeing someone staring at them.
But consider this: you are (most likely) human – and that status comes with a whole lot of baggage, psychologically speaking. We most likely can’t feel a physical effect from being stared at across a room, but what we are good at is cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, rewriting memories, and a whole heap of other mental gymnastics designed to help us cope with being a bald ape cursed with self-awareness.
“Sadly for those who wish we were X-men, it appears much of the body of research supporting the ‘psychic staring effect’ appears to be suffering from methodological issues, or unexplained experimenter effects,” explained Harriet Dempsey-Jones, a Postdoctoral Researcher in Cognitive Neurosciences at the University of Queensland, in a 2016 article for The Conversation. “It is almost certainly an unconscious bias, perhaps due to initial interactions with the experimenter.”
Alternatively, it may be that we’re, well, kind of gaslighting ourselves. “If you feel like you are being watched, and turn around to check – another person in your field of view might notice you looking around and shift their gaze to you,” Dempsey-Jones suggested. “When your eyes meet, you assume this individual has been looking all along.”
The weird part? That’s pretty much the exact explanation that Titchener came up with all the way back in 1898. And thanks to confirmation bias, when we do find someone staring at us, we remember it more than when we don’t.
It seems, then, after more than a century of investigation, we probably had the right answer all along: what causes the feeling of being stared at? Nothing, really.
You’re probably just paranoid.
All “explainer” articles are confirmed by fact checkers to be correct at time of publishing. Text, images, and links may be edited, removed, or added to at a later date to keep information current.
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