Staring

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Giotto di Bondone, staring

Staring (or to stare) - a prolonged gaze or fixed look. In staring, one object or person is the continual focus of visual interest, for an amount of time. Staring can be interpreted as being either hostile, or the result of intense concentration. Staring behaviour can be considered a form of aggression, or an invasion of an individual's privacy. If eye contact is reciprocated, mutual staring can take the form of a battle of wills, or even a game where the loser is the person who blinks or looks away first - a staring contest.

To some extent, the meaning of a person’s staring behaviour depends upon the attributions made by the observer. Staring often occurs accidentally, when someone appears to be staring into space they may well be lost in thought, or stupefied, or simply unable to see.

Staring conceptually also implies confronting the inevitable – ‘staring death in the face’, or ‘staring into the abyss’. Group staring evokes and emphasises paranoia; such as the archetypal stranger walking into a saloon in a Western to be greeted by the stares of all the regulars.

1 Social Norms and Staring
2 Psychology of staring
3 Feeling the Stares of Others
- 3.1 Speculation
- 3.2 Formal investigations
4 Notes

[edit] Social Norms and Staring

The question of social norms and staring has potentially far reaching implications. For example, tight staring policies in urban settings may have led to an increased estrangement of people from one another; that it has become socially unacceptable to exhibit a natural curiosity for another person. On the other level, it is implicated in identity politics – if staring at someone is to objectify them and set them out as different, then the perception of staring behaviour is tied to the recognition of other’s subjectivity and individuality.

Children have to be socialised into learning acceptable staring behaviour. This is often difficult because children have different sensitivities to self-esteem.

[edit] Psychology of staring

The act of staring implies a visual focus, where the subject of the gaze is objectified. This has been the subject of psychoanalytical studies on the nature of scopophilia, with a subsequent development in some aspects of feminist thought (see Gaze, film, photography and voyeurism). Paradoxically, the notion of staring also implicates the looker in constructing themselves as a subject. Sartre was interested in the individual experiencing shame only when they perceive that their shameful act is being witnessed by another. (see The look)

[edit] Feeling the Stares of Others

The idea that people can feel that they are being stared at has been studied.^[1] Rupert Sheldrake wrote a book in 2003 called "The Sense Of Being Stared At":

"Can people tell when they are being stared at from behind? As soon as we ask this question, we realize that there is a great deal of anecdotal evidence suggesting that this is the case. Many people have had the experience of feeling that they are being looked at, and on turning around find that they really are. Conversely, many people have stared at other people's backs, for example in a lecture theater, and watched them become restless and then turn round."

[edit] Speculation

Sheldrake outlines the idea of the extended mind, in which vision "reaches out from the body". ^[2].

"If our minds reach out and "touch" what we are looking at, then we may affect what we look at, just by looking at it. If we look at another person, for example, we may affect him or her by doing so."

Jean-Paul Sartre discusses "The look" in Being and Nothingness, in which the appearance of someone else creates a situation in which a person's subjectivity is transformed without their consent.

[edit] Formal investigations

Several studies have been done on this phenomenon, and have generally had negative results. Correct responses have rarely been much over chance (50%). ^[3]

A 1913 study by E.Coover found positives only 50.2 percent of the time. He concluded that although the feeling of being stared at is common, the experiment shows it to be groundless.^[4]

Closed circuit televisions were used in studies in the 80's, both measuring their belief of being stared at, and the physiological responses when actually being stared at. They returned results barely higher than 50%. ^[5]

A large study by Rupert Sheldrake into staring found that 1858 out of 3496 guesses (53.1%) was correct, divided over 120 subjects in 10 separate experiments. Given the large number of (presumably independent) measurements, the odds of finding this many correct guesses by chance alone are about one in ten thousand (see Binomial distribution); a highly significant result, statistically speaking. Still, while this indicates the presence of a non-chance factor, it is quite small. However, Sheldrake had a surprising result of having two subjects "nearly always right, scoring way above chance levels".^[6] One, a young woman in Amsterdam, had practiced the ability as a child. The other, a young man in California, was under the influence of Ecstasy at the time of the experiment. Sheldrake has since designed a staring test to find more people that have the same performance for formal experiments.