The Sense of Being Stared At Simple experiments show that people can tell when they are being stared at from behind.

1. SIMPLE EXPERIMENTS SHOW THAT PEOPLE CAN TELL WHEN THEY ARE BEING STARED AT FROM BEHIND

Nevertheless, when the lookers and subjects are in the same room, it is difficult to eliminate the possibility that the effect depends on subtle auditory or even olfactory clues. In order to test these possibilities, I have carried out experiments, described in this paper, in which the lookers and subjects were separated by closed windows, effectively eliminating any possible role of smells or sounds. In these experiments the subjects were also blindfolded and deprived of feedback. I also describe the results of independent tests carried out at my request in Canada, Germany and the United States.

Experiments in London : My experiments were carried out between March and June, 1997 at University College School (UCS) Junior Branch, a boys‘ school in Hampstead, London and at New End School, a primary school for both boys and girls, also in Hampstead. Each experiment took place with a different class: at UCS in the second form (age 8-9) or in the third form (age 9-10), and at New End School with class 4 (age 8-9). The experiments were supervised by myself and the class teachers: Mark Albibi, Mark Lall Chopra, Heidi Gregory, Yvonne Gregory at UCS , and Lynn Gavin at New End. Before the experiment began, I gave a brief introductory talk explaining and demonstrating the procedure. I also carried out an experiment at UCS during the lunch break with volunteers, who were boys from forms 2 and 3 who had already been tested with the rest of their class.

As in my previous experiments on the sense of being stared at (Sheldrake [1999]), the children worked in pairs, one (the subject) sitting with his back towards the other (the looker). But rather than being in the same room, the subjects and lookers were separated by closed windows. The lookers were inside the school laboratory or in a classroom, while the subjects sat in a row on chairs outdoors, in the playground, with their backs to the windows.

The lookers were arranged in a row in the same order as their partners, so they could look straight out of the window at them. In most experiments the distance between lookers and subjects was 3-5 metres, and the lookers were looking out of ground-floor windows, but in one case (class 2C at UCS) the lookers were in a first-floor classroom and the subjects were 100 metres away, at the other side of playground. In all cases, the subjects wore blindfolds, kindly supplied by Virgin Atlantic Airways, of the type widely used by air passengers in order to sleep on planes.

In a set of 20 trials, in a random sequence, the looker either looked at the back of the subject or looked away, and was instructed to think of something else. The random sequence was set out on previously prepared instruction sheets, with 24 different random sequences of looking and not-looking trials, compiled on the basis of standard random number tables. These sheets were given to the lookers only after the subject was in place and unable to see the sheet. Subjects were given score sheets, with a list of numbers from 1 to 20, one for each trial, and a space in which they entered their guess for each trial: if they guessed that they were being looked at they put a tick, and if they guessed they were not being looked at, they put a cross. Before the test began, both lookers and subjects were asked to write their names and the names of their partners on their sheets.

I myself was indoors with the lookers, and told them which trial was about to begin, so they could consult their instruction sheets and see whether or not they were to look in this trial. Each looker had a different instruction sheet with a different randomization. When they were ready, either looking at their partners or looking away, I said „Start“, and pressed a button which rang an electric chime in the playground, indicating to the subjects that the trial was beginning. At the end of the10-second trial period, the subjects were told by the teacher supervising them in the playground to write down their guess. To do this they had to raise their blindfold, replacing it when they had written down their tick or cross.

When all the subjects were ready, with their blindfolds in place, for the next trial, the teacher gave me a signal, and I instructed the lookers to get ready for the next trial. (A slightly different procedure was used with classes 3A and 3Q at UCS, in that beside each subject sat a scorer, who also had his back to the window. The subjects told their scorers their guesses, and the scorers recorded these guesses on the score sheets.)

2. SUBJECTS ARE LOOKED AT THROUGH WINDOWS

In these experiments the subjects received no feedback about whether their guesses were right or wrong during the course of the session. Nor did the lookers know what guesses the subjects had made.

At the end of the session, when all 20 trials were completed, the lookers and subjects gave their sheets to me, and I stapled them together in pairs, so that each subject’s guesses could be comparted with the looker’s instructions, to see how many guesses were right or wrong. The subject and looker then changed roles, and the procedure was repeated.

Experiments in other countries : After completing this series of experiments in London, in order to find out if the results could be replicated independently, and I asked three schoolteachers in other countries to carry out similar tests in which the lookers and subjects were separated by windows. All three teachers had already carried out staring experiments with the lookers and subjects in the same room, and were familiar with this experimental method. The details of these experiments were as follows:

• 1. Laura Beatty, a teacher in cccccc, Connecticut, USA, carried out this experiment with her fourth grade class (aged 8-9) in cccccc School. yyyyy, in November 1997. The lookers and subjects were separated by a glass partition wall. Ms Beatty gave the signal for the beginning of each trial by ……. The subjects did not wear blindfolds, but their eyes were closed during the trial and they had their backs to the lookers so they could not see them.
• 2. Helmut Lasarcyk, a teacher in the Stormarnschule, Ahrensburg, Germany, did the experiment in June 1997 with 9 pupils from grade 12 (aged 18). The subjects were outdoors, separated by a window from the lookers in a room on the ground floor. They did not wear blindfolds. The teacher stood in a doorway overlooking both sides and gave verbal signals for the beginning of each trial.
• 3. Greg Wisnicki, a teacher at Sinclair Secondary School, Port Hope, Ontario, Canada, carried out his tests between September 1997 and April 1998 with pupils aged 14-18, who volunteered to participate in the context of a directed studies programme. The trials took place in the school chemistry laboratory, which was adjacent to a preparation room with a two-sided chemical fume hood in between. The subjects were looked at through the fume hood, with the plexiglass shields raised. Thus in this experimental set-up they were not looked at through windows, but possible olfactory and auditory clues were reduced or eliminated in other ways, namely by switching on the fume hood extraction fan, thus removing possible odours that could have travelled from lookers to subjects, and also providing background noise that reduced the possibility of auditory clues. In addition the subjects wore industrial sound eliminators, and they were also blindfolded. They sat with their backs to the starers, 2.5 metres away. One subject at a time was tested, and was looked at by two starers, who were given a freshly generated set of instructions that indicated whether they should look or not look at the subject in a series of 10 trials. These random sequences were determined by a random number generator on a calculator. On a given day, odd numbers were taken to mean staring and even numbers not staring, and on the subsequent day the meaning of odd and even numbers was reversed.

The lookers and subjects were signalled at the beginning of each trial by a signaller, who was out of sight. The signal to the lookers was seeing a card with the number of the trial on it; the signal to the subject was the activation of a small electric motor held in the left hand. In looking trials the lookers looed at the subject through the fume hood; in the not looking trials they looked elsewhere. At the end of each 10-second trial period, the subject indicated his guess by moving a toggle switch forward or backward For the first 50 subjects, moving the toggle switch foward meant they guessed they were being looked at, and backward not looked at. For the next 50 subjects these meanings were reversed; and for the last 23 subjects they were reversed again. When the toggle switch was moved forwards a red light flashed and when backwards a green light flashed, and these guesses were recorded by a recorder who was out of sight of the lookers. Thus the lookers did not know what the subject’s guesses were, nor whether they were right or wrong, and the recorder did not know whether the subjects had been looking or not. The results from each session were later collated with the instructions to the starers, and the data tabulated.

Analysis of the data :The numbers of right and wrong guesses from each set of trials carried out by each looker-subject pair were tabulated in three columns; „Looking“, „Not looking“ and „Total“, enabling the total number of right and wrong guesses in each column to be obtained.

For each set of trials, in each column, the data were also scored as follows:

• + if the subject made more right than wrong guesses
• – if the subject made more wrong than right guesses
• = if the number of right and wrong guesses was the same.

Statistical analysis was carried out in three ways. First, the chi-squared test was used to compare the total numbers of right and wrong guesses in each column. The null hypothesis was that the numbers of right and wrong guesses would be the same.

Second, the chi-squared test was used to compare the total numbers of + and – scores. The = scores were disregarded. The null hypothesis was that by chance the number of + and – scores would be equal. I am endebted to Professor Nicholas Humphrey for suggesting this method of analysis.

Third, the proportion of right guesses by each subject was compared with the chance level of 50% using the the paired-sample t-test. The null hypothesis was that the proportion of right guesses would be 50%. I am grateful to Professor Patrick Bateson, F.R.S. for suggesting this method.

For the comparison of two sets of scores (for example the scores with and without blindfolds ) 2 x 2 contingency tables were used (Campbell [1989]), with the null hypothesis that the proportions of right and wrong guesses in both sets were equal.

3. SUBJECTS GUESS BETTER WHEN LOOKED AT THAN IN CONTROL TRIALS

• The subjects made more correct guesses when they were being looked at than when they were not both in my own experiments in London schools (Table 1) and in the tests in other countries (Table 2). 
• Overall, the percentage of correct guesses was 55.2% in the looking trials and 50.8% in the control trials. 
• Both in London and in other parts of the world the scores in the looking trials were very significantly above chance levels, while in the not looking trials they were not significantly different from the chance level of 50% (Tables 1 and 2). 
• Overall, combining the results of looking and not-looking trials, there were 2544 correct guesses as opposed to 2254 incorrect guesses (53.0% correct), and this difference was very significant staitistically (p<0.00003).
• A very similar pattern was apparent when the data were analysed in an alternative way whereby each subject was scored positive (+) if more guesses were right than wrong and negative  (-) if more guesses were wrong than right (Tables 1 and 2).  Combining the data from Tables 1 and 2,  in the looking trials the scores were 160+ 82- , an extremely significant difference (p<1×10-6), while in the not-looking trials the scores  showed only a small excess of positive overnegative scores (134+ 110-) that was not significant statistically (Figure 1).    
• For the looking and not-looking trials combined the excess of positive over negative scores (150+ 94-) was significant at the p<0.0004 level.
  

4. FACTORS AFFECTING SUBJECTS‘ SCORES