In 1785 English philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed the perfect prison: Cells circle a tower from which an unseen guard can observe any inmate at will. As far as a prisoner knows, at any given time, the guard may be watching — or may not be. Inmates have to assume they’re constantly observed and behave accordingly. Welcome to the Panopticon.
Many of us will recognize this feeling of relentless surveillance. Information about who we are, what we do and buy and where we go is increasingly available to completely anonymous third parties. We’re expected to present much of our lives to online audiences and, in some social circles, to share our location with friends. Millions of effectively invisible closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras and smart doorbells watch us in public, and we know facial recognition with artificial intelligence can put names to faces.
So how does being watched affect us? “It’s one of the first topics to have been studied in psychology,” says Clément Belletier, a psychologist at University of Clermont Auvergne in France. In 1898 psychologist Norman Triplett showed that cyclists raced harder in the presence of others. From the 1970s onward, studies showed how we change our overt behavior when we are watched to manage our reputation and social consequences.
But being watched doesn’t just change our behavior; decades of research show it also infiltrates our mind to impact how we think. And now a new study reveals how being watched affects unconscious processing in our brain. In this era of surveillance, researchers say, the findings raise concerns about our collective mental health.
Watchful eyes
Being looked at grabs our attention, as demonstrated by the stare-in-a-crowd effect: amid a sea of faces that aren’t looking at us, we immediately detect a single one that is. This is because gaze direction, especially eye contact, is a powerful social signal that helps us to perceive others’ intentions and predict their behavior.
Even as babies, a direct gaze quickly draws our attention. “These tendencies emerge very early” and are present across the animal kingdom, says Clara Colombatto, who studies social cognition at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. This ability likely evolved to detect predators, which may explain why being watched can provoke psychological discomfort and physical fight-or-flight responses, such as sweating.
On a conscious level, we behave differently when we are watched. We become more prosocial, meaning we’re more likely to give and less likely to cheat or litter. Some studies have even suggested that theft or littering could be reduced merely by posting pictures of eyes. This kind of thinking led to the idea that surveillance could be used for social good — to prevent crime, for instance — echoing Bentham’s methods for controlling incarcerated people.
The fact that people behave differently under watchful eyes isn’t surprising. Who among us hasn’t acted more selfishly when they were alone than they would when someone could see them? Psychologists put this down to concern with one’s reputation.
But over the past few decades, researchers have found that being watched also affects cognitive functions such as memory and attention. For one thing, it can be very distracting. One study found that participants performed worse on a working memory task when they were presented with pictures of people looking at them compared with when they were shown pictures of people with averted eyes. The researchers concluded that a direct gaze grabs participants’ attention and diverts their attentional resources from a given task. Other studies have found that more functions, ranging from our spatial cognition to language processing abilities, are similarly taxed by a watchful stare.
Unconscious effects
The effects of surveillance on cognition go even deeper — into our brain’s unconscious processing of the world around us. In a study published last December, researchers showed that being watched accelerated participants’ unconscious analysis of faces.
A team led by neuroscientist Kiley Seymour of the University of Technology Sydney used a technique called continuous flash suppression, or CFS, to measure how quickly people detected visual stimuli that initially escaped their conscious awareness. This technique involves presenting moving, colored patterns to one eye, which can delay awareness of images presented to the other eye. Previous studies showed that people would become aware of a suppressed image more quickly if it was more salient. For example, one CFS study found that participants became aware of faces looking at them faster than faces with averted eyes, showing that our brain processes gaze direction before we even know that we’ve seen anything.
Seymour and her colleagues wondered whether this unconscious processing might also be affected by knowing one is being watched. They had a group of people witness cameras being set up to send a live feed of them to another room. The participants were then shown faces that were suppressed by CFS, and they were asked to press buttons to indicate each face’s location.
People in the “watched” group perceived faces faster and more accurately than those in the control group, who performed the same task without the overt surveillance. The difference was nearly a second. “That’s big for these types of unconscious processes,” says Colombatto, who was not involved in this study. Although the surveilled participants reported that they felt that they were being watched, they did not think this affected their performance. The effect was specific to faces — it did not occur for neutral stimuli such as abstract patterns — meaning being watched didn’t just increase arousal or effort across the board. The fact that this unconscious process is influenced by inferring an observer’s presence “shows just how sophisticated social perception is,” Colombatto says.
In the past, researchers assumed the effects of being watched come from seeing people’s eyes, but Colombatto and her colleagues found that pictures of mouths that were directed toward participants negatively impacted working memory. The team has also shown that mouths that are presented using CFS enter conscious awareness faster if they’re directed toward participants rather than away from them. This even works with abstract geometric shapes that can point toward or away from a person, such as cones.
“These effects aren’t really just about eyes. They’re more general effects of people’s minds and attention being directed toward you…. We call these effects of ‘mind contact,'” Colombatto says. “It’s really about being the object of someone’s attention.”
Unseen consequences
Surveillance, then, seems to shift our social processing into high gear. “The conclusion would be that being watched drives this hardwired survival mechanism into overdrive,” Seymour says. “You’re in fight-or-flight mode, which is taxing on the brain.”
How might today’s ubiquitous electronic eyes affect our mental health? The toll could be worse for people with schizophrenia, who, Seymour’s research suggests, may be hypersensitive to others’ gaze. Other conditions, such as social anxiety, also feature hypersensitivity to social cues, and that results in feelings of distress. “I’d say the modern world’s constant surveillance is shifting us all in that direction, to some degree,” Seymour says, “meaning we’re all more attuned to our social environment and on edge, ready to react.”
In the Panopticon, inmates always know a guard could be watching but never if one truly is. This is the key to the prison’s power, argued French philosopher Michel Foucault: it becomes omniscient and internalized by the prisoners themselves. This may be why Bentham’s prison feels so relevant in our digital age of algorithms, data brokers and social media, when we frequently feel watched — but we don’t know who is watching.
This constant surveillance could tax cognition in ways that we don’t yet understand. The faculties compromised by surveillance “are those that allow us to focus on what we’re doing: attention, working memory, and so on,” Belletier says. “If these processes are taxed by being monitored, you’d expect deteriorating capacity to concentrate.” This body of research suggests that bringing more surveillance into workplaces — usually an attempt to boost productivity — could actually be counterproductive. It also suggests that online testing environments, where students are watched through webcams by human proctors or AI, could lead to lower performance.
“We didn’t have as much surveillance and social connections 50 years ago, so it’s a new societal context we’re adapting to,” Colombatto says. “It’s important to think about how this is going to change our cognition, even in unconscious ways.”
This article was first published at Scientific American. © ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved. Follow on TikTok and Instagram, X and Facebook.
