Hood, Bruce - Supersense

This tendency to look for confirming evidence is known as the confirmation bias. It’s the prejudiced reasoning we exercise whenever we make judgements that fit with our preconceptions. We rarely take things at face value but rather look for confirmation of what we believe to be true in the first place. This has been used to great comic effect in the US by the American mortgage company Ameriquest, which has been running an ad campaign showing how easy it is to jump to unjustified conclusions when you don’t know all the facts and when you reason according to your preconceptions. My favourite is the father who is giving his daughter and her friends a lift when they stop off to buy some chewing gum. He calls her back briefly to the car to give her money to buy the gum. As she leans in through the window, he says, ‘Here’s some money.’ At that moment, a police patrol car pulls up behind. ‘What have we got here?’ says the officer as the older man is handing over money to the clearly underage girl. ‘I’m her daddy,’ stutters the father caught in the headlights like a startled deer. The tagline is: ‘Don’t judge too quickly. We won’t.’

The confirmation bias reveals that preconceptions easily shape the way we interpret information. If you think that you can detect unseen gaze, then you remember every example that confirms your belief and conveniently forget all the times you were wrong.

Finally, a sense of being stared at can strengthen from the error of causal reasoning, post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this), described earlier as the basis for superstitious reasoning – in other words, assuming a cause where there is none. Imagine the situation. You are walking down the road and pass a group of youths. You get the uncomfortable feeling that they are staring at you. You stop, turn around and find out that you were right. But consider the sequence again from the perspective of one of the youths. You are hanging out with your friends and this guy walks past. You give him a glance but continue talking to your friends. Suddenly the guy stops and turns around. What do you do? You look back at him to see why he has turned around. In other words, we may think that we turn around because we sense others looking at us from behind but, in reality, they look at us because we turned around to face them in the first place. We are so self-conscious and socially sensitive that this sort of event must happen all the time. Such episodes simply reinforce, however, our beliefs that we can detect when we are being watched. 26

Of course, I may be wrong, and billions of people will disagree with me. After all, they have all had personal experience of the phenomenon and that’s why people believe in the supernatural. But, like the invisible square we saw in chapter 1, just because we all experience something does not make it real. The most prominent and active advocate of the sense of being stared at is Rupert Sheldrake, who proposes that this ability reflects a new scientific theory of disembodied minds extending out beyond the physical body to connect together. I regard this as an idea originating from the dualism of mind and body that we discussed earlier, but such a notion has been rejected by conventional science. Undaunted by ‘scientific vigilantes’, Sheldrake proposes that the sense of being stared at and other aspects of paranormal ability, such as telepathy and knowing about events in the future before they happen, are all evidence for a new field theory that he calls ‘morphic resonance’. He proposes that it is similar to other examples of field phenomena in nature such as electric and magnetic fields. 27His idea is that the scientific evidence for morphic resonance will come from quantum physics, where the natural laws that govern the physical world as we know it no longer apply. This may turn out to be true, but for the moment I do not think morphic resonance qualifies as a field phenomenon.

The trouble is that, whereas electric and magnetic fields are easily measurable and obey laws, morphic resonance remains elusive and has no demonstrable laws. 28No other area of science would accept such lawless, weak evidence as proof, which is why the majority of the scientific community has generally dismissed this theory and the evidence. However, this has had little influence on the general public’s opinion. Science may be wrong about the reality of the sense of being stared at, but what is clear is that the public’s belief in the phenomenon is much stronger than the best measures obtained for its existence so far suggest.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU!

The sense of being stared at reflects a common concern about being observed and monitored. George Orwell describes a paranoid world in his classic novel 1984 , in which every action and belief of the citizens is controlled by the thought police overseen by the eyes of Big Brother. 29We tend not to engage in crime when we are being watched. For obvious reasons, we prefer to remain undetected. That’s part of the thrill of shoplifting by those individuals who steal items they can readily afford. The excitement is the reward, not the actual object. If we are being watched, we generally conform to social rules. People even become overtly social and more cooperative when they know they are being observed. 30

Have you ever felt that pang of guilt when you have done something wrong and then wondered whether someone saw you doing it? It doesn’t have to be a real person watching you. For example, honesty boxes depend on the virtue of people to own up and pay for something if they have used it. Typically, these are the boxes in staff rooms and clubhouses that rely on members to make a fair contribution towards the cost of something, usually a hot drink. They generally don’t work that well unless there is someone watching the partakers. In one study, researchers posted either a set of human eyes or a picture of flowers above the honesty box for coffee and tea. 31On average, people paid almost three times more into the honesty box during the weeks when a picture of staring eyes was posted compared to the weeks when a picture of flowers was presented, even though there was no difference in how many cups of tea or coffee were poured. The eyes made people feel guilty about not paying for their drinks!

Sometimes the thought of someone watching us from beyond the grave is enough to make us behave ourselves. For example, students found they had the option to cheat on a computer-based exam when, every so often, the computer ‘accidentally’ gave away the correct answer. In fact, the experimenters had deliberately programmed this to happen because they were really interested in whether participants would cheat by using this information as their answer or behave honestly on the exam. To put the students in the right frame of mind, an assistant casually told them before the test that the exam room was said to be haunted by a former student who had died there. Exam results showed that students who had been told the ghost story were less likely to cheat compared to students given no such story. 32Our sense of honesty is arguably policed by our feelings of guilt. Part of that guilt comes from the anticipated social disapproval we believe we would experience if we were found to be breaking some rule. Students who believed that a former student might have been present in the exam room were less willing to cheat.

This guilt trip theory has been used to explain why we so readily believe in an afterlife. The psychologist Jesse Bering thinks that the belief in ghosts and spirits may have evolved as a mechanism designed to make us behave ourselves when we think we are being watched. 33A guilty conscience works because it polices the way we behave, and if it can be easily triggered by the sense of others watching us, then we are more likely to act in a way that is for the benefit of the group. In the same way that students are less likely to cheat when told a ghost story, if we believe the ancestors are watching us, we are more likely to conform to society’s rules and regulations. Such a way of thinking, being advantageous to the group, would be likely to be passed on from one generation to the next. As we saw in chapter 5 on mind-reading, assuming the presence of others could be a good evolutionary strategy to always be on the lookout for potential enemies. 34And if we are hardwired to assume the presence of agents and spirits in the world, even the slightest example of a pattern that could be a face or a pair of eyes will readily be seen as such. Any bump in the night could be another person.