On an uneventful day, five passers-by in busy Oxford shopping street suddenly stop and look upwards. They have spotted a camera mounted on a nearby roof, pointed straight at them. But these aren’t strangers who have suddenly realised that Big Brother is watching them. They are actors, who are taking part in a natural experiment that looks at how information spreads through crowds of people.
Andrew Gallup from Princeton University is behind the camera. Using its lens, and technology based on the video-gaming graphics cards, he can track the movement of each pedestrian, and calculate where they’re looking. With this set-up confirmed that people have a natural tendency to look where others are looking. But this contagion of glancing is much weaker than popular psychology books would have us believe.