Do you believe that people’s eyes emit an invisible beam of force?
According to a rather fun paper in PNAS, you probably do, on some level, believe that. The paper is called Implicit model of other people’s visual attention as an invisible, force-carrying beam projecting from the eyes.
To show that people unconsciously believe in eye-beams, psychologists Arvid Guterstam et al. had 157 MTurk volunteers perform a computer task in which they had to judge the angle at which paper tubes would lose balance and tip over. At one side of the screen, a man was shown staring at the tube.
The key result was that volunteers rated the tube more likely to tip over if it was tilted in the direction away from the man gazing at it – as if the man’s eyes were pushing the tube away. The effect was small, with a difference in the estimated ...
