Sensing being watched

[lionking]

I just read a statistic in a magazine sourced to a Professor of Statistics at Macquarie University in Australia that 87% of people say they can sense when they are being watched. Being a spy or a private investigator must be harder than I thought!

Leaving aside obvious cues, like hearing someone coming into a room and assuming that that person is watching you, is anyone aware of any rational explanation for this belief?

 

[brodski]

Confirmation bias.
If someone "feels like they are being watched" it is very easy for them to confirm that they are right -they look around and see someone watching them.
It's not so easy fro them to confirm that they are wrong (they look around and don't see anyone watching them,well it could be that the watcher has looked away, or is hidden, or- in extreme cases is a ghost

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

Yep--confirmation bias. The innumerable times you shift your gaze driving in a car (where many people report this experience), you don't count them as significant except the times when your gaze hits a face pointed your direction. Also, the times someone is looking at you and you don't happen to shift your gaze to them, you remain utterly unaware of another miss.

So you remember the relatively rare hits and have no awareness of how many misses there were, and you end up with a really distorted idea of how many times you shift your gaze when someone is looking at you.

 

[Jeff Corey]

That is not confirmation bias. As Gilovich (1991) says, "When trying to assess whether a belief is valid, people tend to seek out information that would potentially confirm the belief, over information that might disconfirm it. (p. 33, How We Know What Isn't So.
Gilovich then explains the Wason Card Selection Task, which demonstrated that a majority of skeptics at TAM 1 showed confirmation bias.
So it's the search for information that is biased, not the recall.

 

[tkingdoll]

I just read a statistic in a magazine sourced to a Professor of Statistics at Macquarie University in Australia that 87% of people say they can sense when they are being watched. Being a spy or a private investigator must be harder than I thought!

Leaving aside obvious cues, like hearing someone coming into a room and assuming that that person is watching you, is anyone aware of any rational explanation for this belief?

A lot of research was done on this very thing by Richard Wiseman.

Go here:

http://www.richardwiseman.com/research/papers.html

Download this paper:

Schlitz, M., Wiseman, R., Watt, C., & Radin, D. (2006). Of two minds: Skeptic-proponent collaboration within parapsychology. British Journal of Psychology, 97, 313-322.

Read and enjoy!

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

That is not confirmation bias. As Gilovich (1991) says, "When trying to assess whether a belief is valid, people tend to seek out information that would potentially confirm the belief, over information that might disconfirm it. (p. 33, How We Know What Isn't So.
Gilovich then explains the Wason Card Selection Task, which demonstrated that a majority of skeptics at TAM 1 showed confirmation bias.
So it's the search for information that is biased, not the recall.

I don't understand how it's different regarding this issue.

If someone did an unbiased "search" they'd become aware of how many times they shift their gaze and do not encounter someone's eyes. I don't think there's a ready way for them to become aware of the times when someone is gazing at them and they don't turn to look at them.

As it is, people who believe this only count as evidence the instances when they shift their gaze and someone is looking at them. If they looked (or even considered the existence of) evidence that would not confirm what they believe, they'd probably reconsider their belief. If they're answering a poll (as mentioned in the OP) the only thing they have to search for evidence is their memory.

 

[Jeff Corey]

Yep--confirmation bias. The innumerable times you shift your gaze driving in a car (where many people report this experience), you don't count them as significant except the times when your gaze hits a face pointed your direction. Also, the times someone is looking at you and you don't happen to shift your gaze to them, you remain utterly unaware of another miss.

So you remember the relatively rare hits and have no awareness of how many misses there were, and you end up with a really distorted idea of how many times you shift your gaze when someone is looking at you.

As I said, this is not confirmation bias as the term is used by social psychologists such as Gilovich. Remembering the rare hits and ignoring the misses is a different process than not looking for disconfirmations at all.
In the first case, you see all the evidence, but for many reasons remember the hits and not the misses. In confirmation bias, you actively look for confirmation, actively reject the opportunity for falsification and never see the misses.
Maybe this will help http://skepdic.com/refuge/ctlessons/lesson3.html

 

[lionking]

A lot of research was done on this very thing by Richard Wiseman.

Go here:

http://www.richardwiseman.com/research/papers.html

Download this paper:

Schlitz, M., Wiseman, R., Watt, C., & Radin, D. (2006). Of two minds: Skeptic-proponent collaboration within parapsychology. British Journal of Psychology, 97, 313-322.

Read and enjoy!

Thanks teek. I have read other papers by Wiseman so will read it with interest.

 

[T'ai Chi]

Change in air currents? Small change in noise level?

 

[athon]

It's a great experiment to do with kids. I did it with my year nines - they designed a double-blind protocol for it. At first we thought one girl had some 'gift', but found when we did the second trial and moved the kids around this disappeared. Even she agreed in the end that it might have been other clues she was receiving.

Out of ten kids who solidly believed in it and a further seven who gave it some weight of belief, we had nobody in the end feel there was anything to it.

Athon

 

[ChristineR]

This isn't referring to Sheldrake's experiments by any chance, is it?

Sheldrake didn't randomize the positions of his subjects, and he gave them feedback. In other words, after each round the subjects were told if they'd been stared at, and if someone hadn't been stared at for several rounds, Sheldrake would decide that it was time for him to be stared at, and of course the subjects would correctly guess they'd been stared at.

Linky.

 

[Soapy Sam]

Consider how many young men stare at any pretty girl each day.
Consider how rarely she looks back.

 

[Loss Leader]

IIRC, there's a psychological phenomenon called the "imaginary audience" in which people tend to believe that their actions are being observed. Anyone who went to high school has had the experience of passing a group of kids just as they burst out laughing and then having the sick, sinking feeling that they were laughing at you.

So people tend to overestimate the fact that they're being watched in general. This means that any test where you watch people and don't watch them is going to come up with a high level of accuracy for "being watched" and a low level of accuracy for "not being watched." But the high accuracy is, in fact, chimerical. Do a test where the person is never watched and he"ll report being watched just as much.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

As I said, this is not confirmation bias as the term is used by social psychologists such as Gilovich. Remembering the rare hits and ignoring the misses is a different process than not looking for disconfirmations at all.
In the first case, you see all the evidence, but for many reasons remember the hits and not the misses. In confirmation bias, you actively look for confirmation, actively reject the opportunity for falsification and never see the misses.
Maybe this will help http://skepdic.com/refuge/ctlessons/lesson3.html

I'm using it as it's defined in The Skeptic's Dictionary's main entry on the subject:

Confirmation bias refers to a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and to look for what confirms one's beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance of what contradicts one's beliefs.

So I think it's a good answer to the question in the O.P. People are ignoring or discounting the bazillions of times they shift their gaze and don't see someone looking at them. The relatively few times it happens are noticed and counted as evidence.

I suppose there's something else going on, too--like post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning, and then something to do with memory and confabulation. After the fact, people will say that they sensed someone's gaze which caused them to shift their gaze. Each time they recall or retell the story, that sensing part (which really didn't happen) becomes more and more fixed in their memory.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

I also think there's some other confounding things that are dismissed.

For me, the only time this happens is when I'm in a car. If I really look at the circumstances, there's probably other reasons (other than random gaze shifting) why I looked right where I did and a face happened to be there looking back.

For instance, I'm in the right lane and a car in the left land (going the same way) passes from my rearview mirror to my sideview mirror to my blindspot, then reappears in my peripheral vision. I naturally turn my head to that side just as the driver of that car is turning to look at me. I don't think that's even random, but just normal response to visual stimuli added to the fact that our heads are at very nearly equal levels.

I know when I pull up to a boulevard stop when there's another car stopped at the same intersection, I instinctively try to make eye contact. (I usually don't notice it except for times when the other driver doesn't make eye contact. In those cases, I'm reluctant to proceed even if it's my turn because I can't tell that the other driver is aware of my presence.)

 

[Fnord]

Consider how many young men stare at any pretty girl each day. Consider how rarely she looks back.

Which makes more sense:

1) Some women habitually check out their surroundings to see if anyone could be "stalking" them.

2) Some women have a natural ability to sense when they're being checked out.

3) Some men broadcast their thoughts so loudly that women can't help but sense the man's thoughts.

 

[Jeff Corey]

I'm using it as it's defined in The Skeptic's Dictionary's main entry on the subject:



So I think it's a good answer to the question in the O.P. People are ignoring or discounting the bazillions of times they shift their gaze and don't see someone looking at them. The relatively few times it happens are noticed and counted as evidence...

Well, if you don't want to use the technical definition of the term used by the scientists that developed and studied it, fine. But there is a huge difference between not looking at all, and looking and forgetting or discounting what they have seen.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

Well, if you don't want to use the technical definition of the term used by the scientists that developed and studied it, fine. But there is a huge difference between not looking at all, and looking and forgetting or discounting what they have seen.

In this case, at least the argument I was making, isn't that the person had any awareness of the bazillion times they shifted their gaze without meeting someone else's eyes. Not that they knew it and forgot or discounted it, but that they really failed to seek out or consider the information they'd need to make any kind of proper assessment. Confirmation bias.

Plus the other stuff mentioned in this thread.

For the record though, you're right, I don't have any problem using the term as it's described in The Skeptic's Dictionary even if it's not the technical definition used by the people who invented the term.

 

[tkingdoll]

Which makes more sense:

1) Some women habitually check out their surroundings to see if anyone could be "stalking" them.

2) Some women have a natural ability to sense when they're being checked out.

3) Some men broadcast their thoughts so loudly that women can't help but sense the man's thoughts.

I qualify as 'any pretty girl', so I'm wading in. Let's take the most 'checking out' environment on the planet: the gym. When I'm in the gym, I know precisely who is checking me out and to what degree. I know which guys are so immersed in their workout they didn't even look up when I (or any woman) entered (in order to do the would-I-wouldn't-I-could-I-couldn't-I assessment), and which guys can't stop staring. I know which guys are trying to be subtle and which guys are going to come over and use the equipment next to me within five minutes. But I bet that most of the guys think what Soapy does, which is that I am not looking back. I certainly am. I've rated every guy in the room by the time I'm on the running machine (my hubby is always the hottest, of course). Certain environments allow for a certain degree of predictable behavior, and some women are very good at picking up peripheral clues. Without sounding like a total swell head, I've had guys checking me out since I was 14 years old. You get to know the signs, and you can generally tell if a guy is going to stare at you even if you can't see him - just from his behavior when you walked in.

 

[Tanstaafl]

I qualify as 'any pretty girl', so I'm wading in. Let's take the most 'checking out' environment on the planet: the gym. When I'm in the gym, I know precisely who is checking me out and to what degree. I know which guys are so immersed in their workout they didn't even look up when I (or any woman) entered (in order to do the would-I-wouldn't-I-could-I-couldn't-I assessment), and which guys can't stop staring. I know which guys are trying to be subtle and which guys are going to come over and use the equipment next to me within five minutes. But I bet that most of the guys think what Soapy does, which is that I am not looking back. I certainly am. I've rated every guy in the room by the time I'm on the running machine (my hubby is always the hottest, of course). Certain environments allow for a certain degree of predictable behavior, and some women are very good at picking up peripheral clues. Without sounding like a total swell head, I've had guys checking me out since I was 14 years old. You get to know the signs, and you can generally tell if a guy is going to stare at you even if you can't see him - just from his behavior when you walked in.

Geeezzz... I feel like I am soooo busted. And I'm all the way on the other side of the world!