The Sense of Being Stared At: A Preliminary Meta-Analysis
📄 Original study ↗📌 Appears in:
Plain English Summary
Can you actually feel someone staring at you? This meta-analysis (a study that pools together many smaller studies) tackled that eerie question by combining 60 experiments with over 33,000 trials. The overall hit rate was small but wildly statistically significant -- the odds against chance were astronomical, with p-values so tiny they look like typos. The most impressive slice: ten experiments where starers looked through windows, removing any possibility of subtle sounds or body-heat cues tipping people off. Even that ultra-clean subset showed a real, consistent effect. To explain away the results through missing negative studies sitting in file drawers, you'd need thousands of them -- an implausible number. This sits alongside physiological research showing our bodies may react to unseen stares even when we don't consciously notice.
Research Notes
Companion to Sheldrake's (2005) two-part defense of staring detection. Key contribution: even the best-controlled through-the-window studies form a homogeneous, significant dataset, complementing Schmidt et al.'s (2004) physiological staring meta-analysis. Central to Controversy #11 (SOBA).
A preliminary meta-analysis of 60 supervised experiments (33,357 trials) examined whether people can consciously detect being stared at. Fixed-effects weighted mean effect size was e = 0.089 (z = 32.5, p = 10^-232), though significantly heterogeneous. A random-effects model yielded e = 0.114 (z = 10.9, p = 10^-28). The most compelling subset — 10 through-the-window studies without feedback, precluding implicit learning of sensory cues — produced a homogeneous distribution with e = 0.060 (z = 8.31, p = 4.8 x 10^-17). Trim-and-fill analysis adding 6 estimated studies still yielded p = 10^-184. File-drawer estimates of 1,417-7,729 missing studies make selective reporting implausible.
Related Papers
Companion
- The Sense of Being Stared At, Part 1: Is It Real or Illusory? — Sheldrake, Rupert (2005)
- The Sense of Being Stared At, Part 2: Its Implications for Theories of Vision — Sheldrake, Rupert (2005)
- Distant intentionality and the feeling of being stared at: Two meta-analyses — Schmidt, Stefan (2004)
- Fundamentally Misunderstanding Visual Perception: Adults’ Belief in Visual Emissions — Winer, Gerald A (2002)
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📋 Cite this paper
Radin, Dean I (2005). The Sense of Being Stared At: A Preliminary Meta-Analysis. Journal of Consciousness Studies.
@article{radin_2005_sense,
title = {The Sense of Being Stared At: A Preliminary Meta-Analysis},
author = {Radin, Dean I},
year = {2005},
journal = {Journal of Consciousness Studies},
}