The Sense of Being Stared At, Part 1: Is It Real or Illusory?
📄 Original study ↗📌 Appears in:
Plain English Summary
Ever get that creepy feeling someone is watching you? Sheldrake gathered a mountain of data to test whether it's real. Across 58 studies and over 30,000 trials, people correctly detected unseen stares 54.7% of the time — versus the 50% expected by chance. That gap sounds tiny, but statistically it's staggering (odds of a fluke: roughly one in a hundred billion billion). At an Amsterdam science museum, nearly 19,000 people scored well above chance too. Even with blindfolds, one-way mirrors, and closed-circuit TV ruling out ordinary cues, the effect held up. The juicy twist: skeptical researchers got positive results at first — the effect only vanished when the skeptics themselves acted as starers, suggesting who does the looking matters. This is the definitive evidence review for the phenomenon.
Related Papers
Same Research Program
- A Dog That Seems to Know When His Owner Is Coming Home: Videotaped Experiments and Observations — Sheldrake, Rupert. (2000)
- Videotaped Experiments on Telephone Telepathy — Sheldrake, Rupert. (2003)
- Testing a Language-Using Parrot for Telepathy — Sheldrake, Rupert. (2003)
- Testing for Telepathy in Connection with E-mails — Sheldrake, Rupert. (2005)
Companion
- Of Two Minds: Sceptic-Proponent Collaboration within Parapsychology — Schlitz, Marilyn J. (2006)
- Experimenter Effects and the Remote Detection of Staring — Wiseman, Richard. (1997)
- Distant intentionality and the feeling of being stared at: Two meta-analyses — Schmidt, Stefan. (2004)
- The Sense of Being Stared At: A Preliminary Meta-Analysis — Radin, Dean I. (2005)
- Fundamentally Misunderstanding Visual Perception: Adults’ Belief in Visual Emissions — Winer, Gerald A. (2002)
- The Sense of Being Stared At, Part 2: Its Implications for Theories of Vision — Sheldrake, Rupert. (2005)
- Can Animals Detect When Their Owners Are Returning Home? An Experimental Test of the 'Psychic Pet' Phenomenon — Wiseman, Richard. (1998)
Also by these authors
📋 Cite this paper
Sheldrake, Rupert. (2005). The Sense of Being Stared At, Part 1: Is It Real or Illusory?. Journal of Consciousness Studies.
@article{sheldrake_2005_stared_part1,
title = {The Sense of Being Stared At, Part 1: Is It Real or Illusory?},
author = {Sheldrake, Rupert.},
year = {2005},
journal = {Journal of Consciousness Studies},
}