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How do you control for just happening to look when someone else is happening to look, or worse, attracting looks when you check for someone looking? Here's a c

How do you control for just happening to look when someone else is happening to look, or worse, attracting looks when you check for someone looking? Here's a common interaction, which would create that feeling without anything at all underlying it: 1. A person is sitting at a table, with me sitting at a table behind them -- both of us facing the same way, ie, me facing their back. 2. I was staring a few feet to the side of the person -- zoning out in space, and not looking at anything besides the wall pattern. 3. That person has a transient feeling someone is watching, and turns to look. 4. The motion of their head turning causes me to leap to alert, as there's suddenly motion in my peripheral vision -- I move my eyes to focus on the motion, and resolve what it is. 5. We make eye contact, validating their initial belief. 6. The other person has taken a step to condition themselves, similar to Skinner's dancing pigeons. Repeating this interaction over decades leaves them believing in a sense they don't actually possess. Add in some bias in what people remember, eg the times they make eye contact instead of the many times no one was looking, and it's a powerful way to end up confused about the world. I'm not sure how you'd suss this one out without an extra interaction which necessarily confounds the results (eg, an extra observer -- but since we're testing observer effects, that's messy and a half).

taxicabjesus 8y ago
> How do you control for just happening to look when someone else is happening to look, or worse, attracting looks when you check for someone looking? I'm sure you could figure out an experimental protocol. The book I referenced, The Sense of Being Stared At, presumably applies mathematics and statistics to the experiments. But I haven't read it, and I don't care enough at the present time to really dig into the text and respond to your whole comment. Chapter 11 is titled "Experiments on the sense of being stared at". Page 168 begins the discussion of Titchener and Coover's papers. The present PNAS paper's authors say these papers supposedly "showed that [...] people cannot actually detect the gaze of another in the absence of specific sensory information" [quote from the submission]. Sheldrake says, "Titchener's paper was very influential, and was widely cited by skeptics for more than 100 years, even though he said nothing about the actual experiments except that they were negative." Coover's paper was discussed a bit, then "By reinforcing Tichener's negative conclusions, Coover's work seemed to put an end to the matter from a scientific point of view. His paper was published in 1913." Someone supposedly re-did Coover's experiment in 1939, and found the results statistically significant. If you're actually interested in the subject, the ebook version of Sheldrake's book is $12 or so. Otherwise you're just fighting with a straw man [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

taxicabjesus 8y ago

> How do you control for just happening to look when someone else is happening to look, or worse, attracting looks when you check for someone looking? I'm sure you could figure out an experimental protocol. The book I referenced, The Sense of Being Stared At, presumably applies mathematics and statistics to the experiments. But I haven't read it, and I don't care enough at the present time to really dig into the text and respond to your whole comment. Chapter 11 is titled "Experiments on the sense of being stared at". Page 168 begins the discussion of Titchener and Coover's papers. The present PNAS paper's authors say these papers supposedly "showed that [...] people cannot actually detect the gaze of another in the absence of specific sensory information" [quote from the submission]. Sheldrake says, "Titchener's paper was very influential, and was widely cited by skeptics for more than 100 years, even though he said nothing about the actual experiments except that they were negative." Coover's paper was discussed a bit, then "By reinforcing Tichener's negative conclusions, Coover's work seemed to put an end to the matter from a scientific point of view. His paper was published in 1913." Someone supposedly re-did Coover's experiment in 1939, and found the results statistically significant. If you're actually interested in the subject, the ebook version of Sheldrake's book is $12 or so. Otherwise you're just fighting with a straw man [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man