Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, (2008) 72, 98-106

by Rupert Sheldrake

ABSTRACT

Simple experiments on the sense of being stared at have given repeatable, positive results that are highly significant statistically. In these experiments, people work in pairs. The staree sits with his or her back to the starer, who either looks at the back of the staree’s neck, or looks away, in a random sequence. In each trial, the staree has to guess whether or not the starer is looking. However, when Marks & Colwell (2001) and Lobach & Bierman (2004) conducted tests of this kind, some of their experiments gave results not significantly different from chance, and they attempted to explain the positive results in staring tests as artifacts. Their hypotheses predict that positive scores should arise only in trials with feedback, only in trials with one particular kind of randomization, and that scores should increase towards the end of the experimental session. I have examined the data from the first and second halves of more than 19,000 trials to test these predictions. Both with and without feedback, and also with different randomization methods, the scores were positive and statistically significant in both the first and the second halves of tests. With feedback there was a small increase in scores in the second halves, but this was not statistically significant. Without feedback, there was a tendency for the scores to decline. In a trial-by-trial analysis of one large-scale experiment, the highest hit rate occurred in the very first trial for starees who were about to receive feedback, before any feedback had actually been given! Thus the beneficial effect of feedback may not depend so much on the feedback itself as the state of mind of the participants.

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