The Psychology of Being Watched

 

Ever walk into a room and get that feeling that you are being watched?  If so, do you behave differently?  Are you less likely to, say, throw litter on the ground?  According to Sander van der Linden, a doctor of Experimental Psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, you will be a better person when you feel you are being watched.

Van der Linden performed a detailed study on what he calls gaze detection, a “dedicated neural architecture for detecting facial features, including the presence of eyes which served as an important evolutionary tool in ancestral environments, e.g. for detecting lurking enemies.”  According to van der Linden, we are all hard-wired to detect faces and in particular eyes and reading the intent in others eyes.  We had to know if they were the eyes of a friend or a stranger, perhaps even a dangerous enemy.

In modern society, gaze detection manifests as a sort of social referee so that when others are watching us, it has a positive effect on our decision making: we make choices that are better for society as a whole even if it is less desirable or more troublesome for us personally.  Van der Linden’s research specifically studied what people would do with trash in a cafeteria when someone was and wasn’t watching.  Older studies, done in the 1970s showed that people who are being watched are three times more likely to properly dispose of their trash, as opposed to leaving it at the table or on the floor, when they are being watched compared to not being watched.  Studies also showed that it didn’t matter that someone was physically watching; a poster of people with wide-open eyes on the wall had the same effect.  When people perceived a pair of eyes on them, whether real eyes or photographs of them or just figures that resemble eyes, they behaved differently then when they didn’t feel as if they were being watched.

Van der Linden’s studies proved that the same gaze detection behavior could be extended to images that simply looked like a pair of eyes.  In his words, “it doesn’t take a fellow human being to make us feel ‘as if the world were watching,’ not even another living organism. All it takes is an image of a pair of human eyes.” 

 

And it is not an effect that we have conscious control over.  We can’t overcome the behavioral change simply because we are aware of the effect.  It is a hard-wired set of behaviors, providing an evolutionary advantage.  “This makes sense,” van der Linden states “because there is great evolutionary value in being able to quickly assess whether any predators are on the prowl; neural activation of the gaze detection system is fast and automatic. Yet this also means that it’s possible to “trick” the system and this is exactly what the new experiment has shown: objects that merely resemble human eyes are sufficient to trigger human gaze detection and subsequently alter social behavior.”

After reading his study, I wondered how this gaze detection phenomenon might manifest itself in a situation in which a moral choice isn’t an issue.  Could the mere fact that we unconsciously perceive that we are being watched when no action we might do makes any difference except to ourselves make us behave or believe something that we wouldn’t otherwise do so?  When we don’t have a moral choice to make, might gaze detection cause some other psychological effect?  In particular, how might it affect the perceptions of someone sitting in a room at night, especially if they already had a notion that there was paranormal activity occurring in the house?  How might gaze detection affect their behavior?

I posed this question to Dr. van der Linden: Is it possible that this feeling of being watched could, in a situation where one is frightened for whatever reason, cause the person to perceive other imagined phenomena such as hearing sounds or seeing shadows out of the corner of their eyes or just a generally “creeped” out feeling, phenomena that some might assume is caused by a ghost?  This was his response.

 

The question you posed is whether, if a ‘spooky’ environmental cue can be identified, can (gaze detection) also induce behavioural responses other than moral and social adjustments? This is in fact a very interesting research question and I don’t have a straightforward answer. I imagine it can. People often report to feel ‘uncomfortable’ when they know they are being watched, even more so of course when they believe that a deceased individual (or ghost) is watching them. Also, this may very well induce feelings of anxiety and panic.

Emotions that people report while ‘experiencing’ paranormal activity are usually instinctive emotions such as ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety’ that, because of how the brain is wired, are very hard to control, in particular because these emotions originate in the oldest part of the brain, which is very well developed, and as a result often overtakes our ability to continue to reason ‘rationally.’ Recent research has in fact indicated that perceptual and sensory experiences (e.g. ‘feeling a presence’ or ‘picking up energy’) are related to the limbic system, the older part of the brain. In fact, research points to the fact that ‘extrasensory experiences’ are particularly common in individuals that have a strong sensitivity to environmental factors. In other words, people that often experience allergies, headaches, other chronic symptoms or a heightened sensitivity to light, sound, touch and smell are particularly prone to experiencing paranormal activity. Individuals with a heightened sensitivity also tend to be female (about 2/3). So people sensitive to environmental conditions react more strongly, in reason and feeling to incoming informational cues from their environment.”

 

Gaze Detection may become one of the causes of reported paranormal phenomena.  I believe that this could become a powerful tool in the paranormal investigator’s arsenal to prove to people that they are NOT being haunted by a ghost, but that rather subtle psychological behaviors are triggered by the presence of photographs, posters or drawings on the wall or even in decorative motifs.  The next time a client tells you that “people always feel a presence in this room” or report sounds or “shadows out of the corner of my eye”, look around.  If the room has lots of photos of deceased Aunt Martha, maybe it’s not her ghost, but merely her eyes that haunt the place.