Biology Forum 92: 53-76 (1999)

by Rupert Sheldrake

ABSTRACT

The feeling of being stared from behind is well known all over the world, and most people claim to have experienced it themselves. There have been surprisingly few empirical investigations of this phenomenon. I describe a simple experimental procedure with subjects and lookers working in pairs. In a random sequence of trials, the looker either looked at the back of the subject, or looked away and thought of something else. Such experiments showed a very significant excess of correct over incorrect guesses. When subjects were being looked at, they guessed correctly about 60% of the time, whereas in control trials, when they were not being looked at, their guesses were close to the chance level of 50%. The same pattern of results was found in my own experiments with adult subjects, with two different procedures: in experiments conducted in schools in Connecticut, USA: in experiments conducted by volunteers all around the world; and in a previous series of experiments in schools in Germany and the USA. All these sets of data showed a highly significant effect. Taken together they showed that in looking trials, 427 people were more often right than wrong, as opposed to 157 who were more often wrong than right. This difference is extremely significant (p<1x10-25). In the control trials, there was no significant difference between the number of people who were more often right than wrong (294) and more often wrong than right (287). These results suggest that the feeling of being looked at from behind is a real phenomenon that depends on factors as yet unknown to science. Non-human animals may also share this kind of sensitivity, which may be of evolutionary sugnificance in the relationships between predators and prey.

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