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.
Abstract
Meta-analysis of 60 experiments investigating the conscious sense of being stared at suggests that the reported effects may reflect a genuine ability. A subset of 10 of these studies, designed to preclude implicit learning of sensory cues, resulted in a homogeneous distribution of effect sizes and a weighted mean effect size substantially beyond chance expectation (p = –17).
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},
}