Here's looking at you, kid

Focuses on the detection of unseen stares of other people. Role of the eyes in social interaction.

By PT Staff, published on July 01, 1996

DETECTING STARES

As a rule, we humans get more rational as we age. We're less likely to believe in Santa Claus, say, or in assorted superstitions. So Ohio State psychologists were surprised to find that the belief that people can detect the unseen stares of others actually increases as students progress from first grade to college.

In fact, a whopping 93 percent of college students insisted that they could feel an unseen person staring at them. A third even thought that they could feel stares from animals.

All of which flies in the face of experiments that show humans lack any ability to detect unseen stares. So why do these beliefs exist at all, let alone increase with age? They may stem from the prominent part eyes play in social interactions, suggest Ohio State's Gerald Winer, Ph.D., and Jane Cottrell, Ph.D. Also, our occasional correct intuitions about stares reinforce our beliefs. And we probably remember those correct guesses better than we do the far more numerous wrong ones.