Why do you sometimes simply ‘feel’ that somebody is looking at you?

Question

Why do you sometimes simply ‘feel’ that somebody is looking at you?

In: Biology

Answer 1

We ‘feel’ it sometimes but that does not always make it a fact that others are really looking at us.

We are more likely to think that people are looking at us if we are self conscious and if we think that appearing “normal” or “socially acceptable” is important to us.

If we look up and see that people were in fact looking at us then we remember that incident but not the other 1000 incident when people were not looking even though we ‘felt it’. See “selective attention” and “confirmation bias” for more info.