By Andrea Hargraves :strip_icc()/i.s3.glbimg.com/v1/AUTH_da025474c0c44edd99332dddb09cabe8/internal_photos/bs/2024/5/K/pHfJTpS4yh5PvWzaBA1g/close-up-man-preparing-steal-from-young-woman-1-.jpg)
Have you ever felt that pressure on the back of your neck, as if someone was watching you, and when you turned around, there was actually someone watching you? Maybe yes. Research indicates that between 68% and 94% of people have this feeling. But is this possible?
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Although it may seem unbelievable, science has actually investigated this many times over the course of more than 100 years. The first scientific paper examining this phenomenon, according to the scientific website IFLScience, dates back to 1898: “Every year I meet a certain percentage of students, in my middle school classes, who are firmly convinced that they can ‘feel’ that they are being watched.” “From behind, a smaller percentage believe that by constantly looking at the back of the head they have the ability to make the person sitting in front of them turn around and look at them,” says Edward Titchener, a professor of psychology at Cornell University.
Since then, many studies have been done to try to clarify whether humans can tell whether they are being looked at magically or not. The results were, let's say, “mixed.”
In 1912–1913, experimental research on gaze detection was conducted at Stanford University, according to a 1993 review by authors William Braud, Donna Shafer, and Sperry Andrews—all advocates of parapsychology and pseudoscience. The results indicated that gaze detection was “experimentally unsound.”
As early as 1959, Johannes Portmann, a professor who wrote about parapsychology, tried to guess whether or not he was being observed by another experimenter. With an accuracy rate of 59.55%, he considered the results “very suggestive and promising.”
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Other experiments largely followed this pattern: skeptics found no effect of “remote gazing,” while believers found evidence for it.
After a lot of research, what do scientists think today?
The scientific consensus on this is that we probably can't feel the physical impact of being watched from across the room, but we're good at cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, rewriting memories, and a host of other mind games.
“Unfortunately for those who want to be X-Men, much of the research supporting the 'psychological gaze effect' seems to suffer from methodological problems or unexplained experimental effects,” says postdoctoral researcher Harriet Dempsey-Jones. in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Queensland, in a 2016 paper “It's almost certainly unconscious bias.”
“If you feel like you're being watched and turn to check, someone else in your field of vision might notice you turning and looking around and end up looking at you,” Dempsey-Jones suggested. “When your eyes meet, you assume that person has been looking the whole time.”
It's the same thing Titchener said in 1898. Thanks to confirmation bias, when we catch someone staring at us, we remember that more than when we don't.
It seems, then, that after more than a century of research, we may have had the right answer all along: What causes the feeling of being watched? Nothing, actually.