Experiments on the Sense of Being Stared At: the Elimination of Possible Artefacts

Journal of the Society for Psychical Research Vol. 65, pp.122-137 (2001) EXPERIMENTS ON THE SENSE OF BEING STARED AT: THE ELIMINATION OF POSSIBLE ARTEFACTS by RUPERT SHELDRAKE

Open Peer Commentary

Meta-analysis of 60 experiments investigating the conscious sense of being stared at suggests that the reported effects may reflect a genuine ability. A subset of 10 of these studies, designed to preclude implicit learning of sensory cues, resulted in a homogeneous distribution of effect sizes and a weighted mean effect size substantially beyond chance expectation (p =). Two types of experi...

The feeling of being stared at: An analysis and replication

When data generated in “the feeling of being stared at” experiments are adjusted to account for response biases, hit rates associated with responding “yes” when being stared at, and “no” when not being stared at, are virtually identical. Experiments conducted where the possibility of such cues were reduced showed similar results, arguing against sensory artifacts. In a computer-based replicatio...

The Sense of Being Stared At: Fictional, Physical, Perceptual, or Attentional/Intentional

According to a well-known adage of folk psychology, “where there is smoke, there is fire.” In his two-part contribution to this symposium on “the sense of being stared at,” Rupert Sheldrake examines some of the smoke (fictional allusions, anecdotal observations and reports, and the persisting lore) surrounding this alleged phenomenon and attempts to determine whether such smoke might indeed be ...

Confusion worse confounded By Susan Blackmore Commentary on Sheldrake

In Part 1. Sheldrake consistently mixes up the sense of being stared at that derives from the normal senses of vision or hearing, with a putative sense that he claims can operate without normal sensory cues. He might have avoided confusion by giving a name to this proposed paranormal sense, and then made clear, throughout the paper, which he was referring to at different times, but he did not. ...