Stuff You Should Know - What's the Deal With Staring?

Episode Date: November 17, 2015

Gazing too long upon another person is almost universally viewed as anywhere from impolite to hostile, which is odd considering science isn't fully certain why we stare - and why we're so good at knowing when we're being stared at. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant,

and guest producer Noel is actually staying in here, I believe. He's staring at us. For this one, he is. As we speak. It's making my cheek blush, just the one though. Yeah. Which is weird.

It's a tease is what that is. It's a little bit of a tease. So I'm anything, I'm a big tease. Uh, spoiler alert. Okay. Now that was it. That your cheek is hot. It's a post-spoiler alert.

Posts. I don't know if those work. Count, I think you can set the internet off into a frenzy if you do it the wrong way. Oh yes, we've done that before. Oh yeah, that's right. You say spoiler alert beforehand, apparently. Yeah.

I thought you just spoiled it and then said spoiler alert. Right. As a tag. Yeah. It's not how it works. No. Chuck. Yes.

Have you ever been to the grocery store? Uh, yeah. I was there yesterday. Were you? Did you go down the street by cereal? No. I don't really buy cereal much either. I appreciate cereal.

You know, I'm glad it's still around, but I just don't buy it myself. Yeah. Every once in a while I'll go down the cereal. It's just almost like to visit old friends. Oh, like there's the Count Chocula. Yeah, exactly. There's Fred Flintstone.

What the heck happened to Lucky the Leprechaun? He doesn't look anything like he did when we were kids, you know? Look at Tony Tiger. Yes. While I'm walking down the cereal aisle, I notice like they don't like hold my gaze like they used to, actually.

Because you're not seven. No, actually there's this study that found, and I think to the last couple of years at Cornell University, they have like a whole food psychology program, you know? I love that stuff. And they did a study of like, I think, 65 different cereals and found that average gaze, downward gaze, is about a 9.6 degree gaze, right?

Of just your normal human walking? No. In the cereal aisle. In the cereal aisle. So like if you were looking at Tony the Tiger, and you were me in our normal adult height, he wouldn't be locking eyes with us. But if we were little kids, he'd

be looking right into our eyes. Toucan Sam. Toucan Sam, lucky. All Captain Crunch, which we talked about. Yeah, the Honeycombs Maniac. Yeah, the Golene Fiber Stick. Sure. All of those guys, they look into little kids' eyes.

And the whole reason why is because it builds brand trust and brand loyalty. Among cereal boxes where the character is looking right into your kids' eyes on the cereal aisle, there's like a 28% brand loyalty compared to 16% among boxes that don't have little characters looking into your kids' eyes. And it all just kind of goes to show you

like the stare, even being stared at by a lifeless cardboard cartoon character, is that powerful that it can make you say, I want to eat what's inside of you. Yeah. You know? Sure. So the gaze, it's powerful.

Or like the old days when I was single and I would go into a bar and just go right up beside a lady and just stare at her face until she looked at me. Make your eyes as wide as you possibly could. They love that stuff. Sure. Very powerful. It shows what a panther you are.

A creep is what that would be. Sure. Yeah. And I mean, that's a really great point. Like if it's a leprechaun on a cereal box, you're not threatened or intimidated by it, but there's still some sort of power to its gaze, right? Yeah.

If you're another human being, that is so powerful. It has to be wielded very delicately because people don't like to be stared at. As this House of Forks article points out, it's simply rude to stare. Yeah, it can be, depending on what culture you live in, it can be everything from an intimidation tactic to an affront to something that's very aggressive.

Yeah, it means a lot of things around the world, but I didn't find a lot of cultures where it was super nice. No, the closest thing I could find was Argentina being called out as it being socially acceptable for men to stare at women. That doesn't mean that it's welcome to a man. Right. It's not welcome necessarily or wanted,

but it's not like what are you doing kind of thing. But I couldn't find any culture around the world where just outright staring is just normal and fine. It seems to be universally, it makes people uncomfortable, it seems like. Yeah, well, this article, we're going to draw from a few, but one from our own website, why is it rude to stare, which I never really answers, actually.

No, it doesn't. It sort of gives some reasons. Stanced around it. But I did think they made a good point, whoever wrote this early on in the article, that humans are constantly categorizing things when we look around at anything. Right.

From inanimate objects, that desk looks comfortable, or that chair looks nice. Or let me lay down on that desk. That car is cool, or that person is white. That person is a woman. That person is attractive. That person isn't. Like, we're always scanning and dropping things

into different mental boxes. Right. And so they make a pretty good point, I think. Whenever something is just slightly off, like that person has one leg, it just, the brain has an instinct to stay on that gaze a little longer, because it just disrupts the normal, like, that's a thing, that's a thing, that's a thing.

And that's different, so let me look at that for a minute. Right, and the whole idea behind us walking around constantly scanning our environment is this idea that we've evolved to, at first, I guess, probably hunt for predators. Remember, in the gun control episode, we talked about how humans can recognize a gun in the environment as readily as recognizing snakes or spiders?

Yeah. So we're trained to pluck stuff out of our environment that may or may not be a threat. Yeah. Because we've kind of moved away from the possibility of, you know, a bear eating you, typically. It still happens infrequently, but for the most part, we're not threatened by bears, right?

We've, that same ability has kind of moved into this social realm, where that whole in-group, out-group categorization that we've talked about, too, really kind of comes up. And so we're walking around saying, you're okay, you're all right, you may be a threat, so I'm gonna move over here on the other side of the street. Right.

I don't necessarily recognize you, but we can do all this pretty quickly, right? Sure. But it's like you were saying, if you see somebody with missing a face, for example, is a good one. And I read this wired article that cited a woman who basically was like, her husband shot her in the face.

And she walked around before a face transplant, like missing a significant section of the middle of her face, and she just was stared at all the time, she said she had to get used to it. I'm sure. This article points out that all you're doing, necessarily, is taking in more information than you're used to, and we do that by staring.

It's a result of saying, there's more info than I can just get through with a quick glance. I need to look at you a little while longer. Right, and then there was a study at USC, as in Southern California in 2012. This one makes a lot of sense to me, because I think what you're doing is you're satisfying a curiosity, like, I guess Oscar Pistorius

is a weird example now that he's gone through that thing. But let's say, pre that, pre that incident, you would see someone like Oscar Pistorius and say, wow, I wanna see how this guy runs without legs. So I'm gonna look at him, put on those blades, and run. And of course, he's a, you know, it's a spectator sport. Right, so you can get away with it. But I mean, could it happen any day?

Like, someone who's handicapped, like, I wonder how they drive a car with no legs. Right. So it's very interesting. So I'm gonna look at that, and watch them get in the car, and have a specially outfitted car with hand operation. Sure. So it's weird, because in that case, I don't think it's rude,

but you're walking a fine line. But it is still very rude. Another non-murderous example, like the second one you gave, is there was, in this study at USC, they used women with novel biological effectors, meaning in this case, that their arms hadn't fully developed. But they were performing functions

that people would normally use their hands for with their residual limbs. Right, so someone might be like, wow, how is she painting or cooking her dinner? Exactly. But at the same time, you're right, you're walking that fine line. So you're staring, but maybe you look away,

but then you look back and you kind of have to take it in pieces, because we are in this weird position where we want to take in, but we're also socialized to not stare as well. It's rude. Well, what they determined in this study though, which sort of backs up the idea

that it is satisfying the curiosity is, they looked at the brains of people staring at, let's say, the lady without the formed limbs. And after they looked for a little while, the brain lit up at first like, oh my gosh, what am I seeing? This is super interesting. Right.

And then the brain normalized and was like, oh, okay, well, that's how she cooks her dinner. That's really neat. Exactly, and then they were able to interact normally after that point. So it's almost like, as long as your brain hasn't gotten enough information to its satisfaction, you're not gonna feel comfortable.

There's gonna be something weird and different around it. And if you interact with somebody before you've satisfied your brains, you need to understand what the heck's going on there, then you might not interact with them as comfortably as you would if you were able to sit there and take it back. And they did this by having people watch other people

through like a one-way mirror, I think, and watch them for a few minutes. Their brains, I guess, became satisfied or figure it out what the process was. And then after that, they interacted with the people much more normally than they did before they were able to fully satisfy their brain's curiosity.

Yeah, it's like, this might be a pretty lame example, but it's like if you have a huge zit on the end of your nose, and you walk into a group of friends for a meeting, you might say, just get over with. I got this huge zit on my nose. Like Fred Savage in Austin Powers, the mole. The mole, like acknowledging it.

Hey, I got this huge thing. Instead of being weird about it, just go ahead and take a good gander. Isn't it amazing? And now let's just act normal. And then nine times out of 10 people are like, yeah, great. I just put my hand in front of my face and pretend that nothing's different.

Is the makeup not working? Right. But the thing is, it's, you know, a zit. You know, people have zits themselves. They're fairly well understood. And it's transient, you know what I mean? So there is definitely, looking at somebody who is differently abled

or just different in any way, it can be considered rude, especially if that person has to put up with it again and again. But I think there's just not that understanding of what is the basis of it. And of course kids are gonna do that. And as parents, you are probably Johnny on the spot

by saying, don't stare at that person, that lady without a face. Right. She, you know, it's not nice. Whereas the kids just thinking like, I've never seen someone without a face. Right. And the parent, you know, is thinking that same thing,

but they're just having to do the parental thing and, you know, like steal a quick glance. Right. And not to stare. Because it's been socialized out of them. Yeah, it's super interesting to me. But it seems to be innate because kids do it, and then they have to be taught not to do it, right?

Yeah. So I wonder almost if it's then, in that circumstance, if it's like a vestigial trait. Ah. You know, like it's an innate thing that like the kid is responding to the kid's evolutionary history. Right.

But it hasn't been socialized to not do that yet. So there's like this social layer that's being put on top of an evolutionary trait. Yeah. So staring seems pretty straightforward so far. Right. Actually, it gets way, way more complex. And we will dig into that right after this.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody

about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So we're back and we're talking about being stared at. Which, by the way, I didn't get a chance to listen to it, but Robert and Julie at Stuff to Blow Your Mind did this,

did a staring episode a few years back. Did a stare off? Yeah. Who won? I bet Julie won. I would guess, yeah. Again, I don't know. I'm sure they did, though, now that you mentioned it.

So Chuck, we're talking about staring and how maybe the evolutionary adaptations to it. And there's a further idea that we've actually evolved, our eyes have evolved, to really understand when somebody's looking at us, right? I think it's pretty neat. The gaze detection system? Yeah, they make the point in here.

Which article was this from? This one was from Psychology Today. Basically, the difference, the main difference between humans and a lot of animals is with people, you can see a lot more whites of the eye than you can with most animals. So the dark parts, that is, the parts that look at you, you can really tell when those things are moving around.

Right, exactly. You can tell when you're being looked at a lot more easily. Yeah, so if the dark parts are in the center of the eye, roughly, you can assume that you're being looked at. If the dark parts are to the right, the person's looking to the right. If the dark parts are to the left, vice versa, right? Yep, I'm looking at Noel out of my, I guess you would say,

peripheral vision. Exactly. So I can relax because you're not looking at me. You're looking at Noel, so I can go back to knitting or starting fires, whatever. But Noel needs to be on his best behavior. And that's actually one of the two suggestions for why we're so responsive to being looked at.

Like, there's a couple of things. So with this gaze detection system, they've determined that if you are looking toward me, Chuck, but over my shoulder, and I can just kind of tell, right? So your head is looking at me, your eyes are generally at me, but you're just like a degree or two off. Yeah, like right now, isn't that weird? Yeah, right now, it is kind of off-putting.

But right now, you're setting off a different kind of neuron in my brain than you are now that you're looking directly at me. Now different neurons are firing. Like specific neurons for when someone is looking right at you fire, which is awesome. Exactly. Like we have basically a region of the brain dedicated to that.

Yeah. And I have to say, you and I are like staring at each other way more than normal in this episode. Oh, you think? Oh, yeah. Interesting. Or maybe we're just talking about it more than usual. I'm not sure.

The other cool thing is you tend in your peripheral vision to notice more when instead of someone just looking at you straight on with their body and their face, if someone is looking from the side and turning their head completely to the right to look at you, that will stand out a lot more in your peripheral vision than someone just standing, staring straight at you. Yeah.

Which is super weird. It really is. Today when I was driving in, there was this woman walking her baby in a stroller down the street. Yeah. And I was just looking at her kid. And I was driving parallel to her. But my head, I'm sure, was turned toward them.

She wasn't looking anywhere near me. And just all of a sudden, she turns her head and just completely meets my gaze. Yeah. Right? Like, she saw somehow, probably in her peripheral vision, that there was somebody in a car looking at her kid. Yeah.

And she needed to check it out. So she threw the cover over the stroller real quick, and turned around and went the other way. She's like, a monster. Yeah, it's, I don't know. I find all this stuff fascinating, like, whether or not you can feel when you're being stared at directly to your back, let's say.

Well, that's something different. So like, all this up to this point, we've been talking about stuff that can be explained away using like your peripheral vision, noticing other people's body language, looking at where the eyes are. Now we're getting into just some weirdness. And something called the psychic staring effect,

or scopesthesia, or the feeling that you're being stared at from behind, even though there's no way, using your normal senses, you should be able to tell that someone is looking at you. Yeah, and this, there was a paper. This is from the article, The Feeling of Being Stared At. And there's an old paper from 1898 from Science Magazine called The Feeling of Being Stared

At by Edward Tichner. Yeah. And he said, and this was sort of a weird feedback loop, but he said, if you go to the front of a room, and you have your back to everyone, you're going to feel like you're being stared at. And then you're going to get nervous and start fidgeting around, which will cause people to stare at you.

Yeah. So that doesn't do much for me. He also said, it's possible that when you think someone's staring at you, you start to turn around to see them, to catch somebody staring at you, or to see who it is. And they'll then look at you. Right. They notice you moving, and they start looking at you

before you've made it all the way around. And you say, see, you were looking at me. Exactly. And you say, no, Jerk, I didn't look at you until you turned around and looked at me. Right. And then it just turns into a fistfight every time, without fail.

So Tichner basically was like, ah, it's all illusory. It's done. He didn't really write necessarily about all of his methods or study size or anything like that, but he felt like he kind of settled it. 15 years later, there was a guy who picked it up. Again, his name was J.E. Koover.

He wrote another paper called The Feeling of Being Stared At. And he tried a little more scientifically to figure out what was going on. And he had a pretty cool, I thought his technique was pretty awesome. It was OK. He would sit there and have a study participant with his

back to him. And he would roll a dice, a die. And if it came up even, he would not stare at them for 15 seconds. If it came up odd, he would stare at them for 15 seconds. And then each time, the person needed to write down what they thought, whether they were being stared at or not. Yeah, and it lined up pretty consistently.

But what this points out and what a few of the other staring studies point out is, if you know you're in a staring study, you may be more clued in, even if you're blindfolded to think, oh, I feel like someone's staring because I'm supposed to. Right, exactly. Like you're thinking about being stared at. Yeah, exactly.

So in this J.E. Koover study from 1913, he found that people guessed at about 50% of the time, which is even with chance, right? So that suggests that you don't really have any kind of signal or sense that you're being stared at. You're just guessing and you're primed to being guessed. And yet, follow-up studies have shown that if people are distracted with another task, or if they don't think the

study's actually about whether or not they're being stared at, they almost never guessed that they're being stared at. Yeah. It only starts to show up in studies where you're testing for that sense of being stared at and they're primed to guess. And then you know that.

But even then, they're just guessing at about the same rate as chance. So Tishner and Koover, and others later on over the years, have basically suggested that scopesthesia or that feeling you're being stared at is very widespread. Most people believe that they can tell when somebody's staring at them, but that it's actually an illusion that isn't necessarily explained in any of these.

But it is a widespread illusion that humans tend to suffer from universally. Well, and anecdotally, you might remember the times where I feel like someone's staring at me and someone is, but not remember the times that you feel like someone's staring at you and you look up and no one's staring. Yeah. Like you don't catalog that.

Well, that was another thing they found, too, is that there's no, no one's ever found any idea that you can tell when you're not being stared at. It's just being stared at that we supposed to have a sense for. All right. Well, let's take another break here, and we'll talk about a few more weird staring studies right after this.

Hey, everybody out there in podcast land, we want to alert you to what we're going to call a podcasting event. An event like the moon landing, but for podcasting, basically. That's right. It's a new podcast from GE Podcast Theatre in Panoply called The Message. It's an eight episode series that's pretty much going to

blow your scientific mind. Yep. The message follows the story of Nikki Tomlin, a PhD in linguistics from the University of Chicago, who follows a team of cryptologists at a research think tank called Cypher. These researchers are trying to decode a message that was received from outer space 70 years ago.

It's going to be pretty awesome. Man, that's amazing. And if you want to subscribe and you should just go to iTunes, look it up or wherever you get your podcasts. Yep. We'll be doing that, won't we? That's right. Available now wherever you get podcasts, including iTunes.

GE Podcast Theatre's The Message. All right. All righty. We're back. And here's a weird staring study. Yeah, they've done a lot of them. And this is from an article of the many creepy experiments that involve staring at people.

An I09. Great website. So this one, the stare as a stimulus to flight in human subjects was, I thought, pretty interesting and kind of a no-brainer. Basically, they would have someone stand on a corner. And then when people would pull up in their car at the light of the stop sign, they would just stare at them in their car.

And then they would time how long it took them to get the heck out of there when the light turned green. Yeah. And of course, naturally, they don't even release the results. I imagine it was about 100% that people sped out of there when the light turned green. Yeah, they had a control group that they specifically didn't

stare at or look at. And they definitely left that intersection much more slowly. Yeah, because there's not a creep leering at you on the sidewalk. Yeah. That's a weird study. But I mean, I guess it added to the scientific body on staring.

By 1%. This one, I thought this was interesting because it actually harkens back to what Tichner studied, too, was that there's this weird part of the psychic staring effect where physically you can feel like you're being stared at, like the back of your neck gets hot. Yeah. When I was in college, I used to like, my scalp would get

hot or something, you know? Like, I just knew I was being stared at from behind. And this study found that we produced some sort of physical effect when we're stared at, right? So in this particular study, they had a psychologist sitting there, I guess, interviewing a person. And then another psychologist would be staring at the person while they were forced to either read out loud or

sing. Yeah, the person being stared at would have to do those things. Yeah, thank you for specifying that. And the other, the second psychologist would stare like directly at their cheek. And the person would blush all over, especially if they were having to sing.

But the cheek that was being stared at would blush more. It would get hotter. Like, physically, they would measure this. Yeah. It wasn't just anecdotally like, my right cheek feels hotter. No. And no one has any idea how this happens or why this happens.

But it's almost like the self-consciousness that's produced in being stared at is directed to the specific part of the body that's being looked at, you know? That's very bizarre that that happens. It is very bizarre. Yeah. Well, because they haven't figured it out. No.

They'll probably isolate something at some point. Yeah, eventually they will. But I mean, if you start to compile this body of knowledge on staring, you get the idea that we have a very loose grasp on the effects of staring and what it does and what it signifies and why it's around. It's pretty interesting. I always loved those episodes.

I do, too. There was this other study I thought was pretty interesting called Gaydar, colon. I gaze as identity recognition among gay men and lesbians. And I tried to find a copy. I couldn't find one that I didn't have to pay like $50 for. But I did read some summaries.

It basically looks into how gay men and women use a stare to either assess someone's sexuality or to broadcast their own sexuality. And it's not always just a fixed gaze. Not some creepy stare. But it was mixed with body language and looking away and like a flirtation at times. But I thought it was pretty interesting.

It's definitely not just some heterosexual concept. And staring is not just creepy. It's not just for flirting. They've actually found in other studies that it's a way to ask for help, actually. And it gets results, supposedly. Yeah, this one didn't make a ton of sense to me. So if you spilled some groceries, I think, is what

this one study did. If you dropped some groceries and you bent over and picked them up, if you just keep to yourself and bent over your groceries and you're looking down at them, you got it. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. In this study, if you look up, though, and are staring at a pastor by while you're doing this, they take that as an

invitation, if not a directive, to come help them pick up the groceries. And people respond to that. It's the same thing. Like, think about it. Like, if somebody is in a situation where they could use help, but it's also ambiguous, they kind of got it, but do they really need help?

If they're looking at you, they're broadcasting, help me. They are. It's just kind of funny because I'm trying to think. It just seems like a no-brainer. Like, if I saw a woman in a parking lot who had spilled her groceries and I was walking by and she looked up right at me as I was passing and picking up, I wouldn't just say, like, how you doing?

And keep going. Bummer, huh? Yeah. Boy, you look like you got it under control. Like, of course I would stop, but. If she didn't look up. Yeah. Maybe I would feel like I'm intruding.

Exactly. You know? So she doesn't want me putting her hands on her groceries. Right. And that is one of the theories behind why we're so adept at catching other people's gazes. Yeah. Is that it's a means of communicating non-verbally,

very directly, right? So that woman who dropped her groceries, or anybody who drops their groceries, if they're handling themselves, leave them alone. If they're looking up directly at you, they're communicating with you. They have spilled their groceries. And what they're saying is, I could do some help with some

groceries, picking them up. And that's that theory behind that, the idea that we communicate and engage in social behavior just from looking is called the Cooperative Eye Hypothesis. And it's basically this idea that. Not a bad band name. Cooperative Eye Hypothesis. It's a little wordy, but a little.

Like I could see like a math rock band. It's no Kathleen Turner overdrive. Maybe the best band name of all time. Yeah. But this whole thing is that we are able to communicate, not just that we need help, but also we tend to follow one another's gaze. If one person's looking off in the distance and clearly

looking at something not zoned out, people are going to look over there. And it's basically the same thing as like a herd of gazelles looking over at what this one gazelle on high alert is suddenly looking at. Yeah, you want to have some fun. Go to New York City or any city and just with one other person and just go stand and both look up and stare at

something and then just sit back. Well, you can't sit back, but have a friend sit back and watch how many people in New York, of course, they won't stop and look. But everyone that passes you by will look up and say, what in the world are these two people looking at? Yeah, what are you looking at? Yeah.

What's up there? You're staring at nothing? You just don't say anything. And then a game of telephone will break out. People will just start making up what's up there. Yeah, and then it becomes a, what do you call it, when people all get together and dance at one time somewhere? Flash mob.

Flash mob. Yep. That's an organic flash mob. Yeah, you just have a bunch of people staring. It's a very boring flash mob. I got one more. All right. The idea that being aware of being stared at basically

keeps us in line. The idea that we're being stared at or watched. Oh, makes you behave. Yeah. Another socially pro-social motivation. And I got another grocery store example. I was at the grocery store yesterday. And I was walking in the parking lot.

And this woman had her cart. And I noticed her looking around. And she was about to leave her cart right there in the parking lot next to her. And she saw me looking at her. And she just suddenly went and walked it over to the cart corral. You could tell by her movement she was not playing on going

to the cart corral until she saw me watching her. And then she took it to the cart corral. I'm like, yes. Shame. Exactly. You engage in more ethical behavior if you think you're being watched. And that would explain why we're such a social species.

Sure. And just having that heightened awareness that you're being watched is possibly part of that. Yeah. That's one of my couple of big rules in life that are meaningless to most people. But always return your cart. Yeah.

Don't be one of those people like, oh, they pay people to go around and get the carts. It's because they have to. Because of you. And the other thing is always throw your movie theater popcorn and drinks away on your way out. Oh, yeah. The people that just get up and leave the movie theater with

their popcorn bag and their drink there. It's pretty easy. Yeah, I just don't get it. I'm just going to go and say it. Those are the worst people on the planet. If you want to become canonized, Chuck, not only should you return your cart, you can do the opposite and take a cart from somebody so they don't even have to take it back if

you're on your way in. Yeah, I've done that. That's the same level stuff. I rarely use the big cart, though. I do a lot of daily grocery shopping. Yeah. It's a good way to go. It's very Dutch.

Is it? According to the stuff for the next article it is. Yeah. Well, I wear my wooden clogs and ride my bicycle. It's very astute of you. Thank you. Are you getting anything else? You know what?

This just reminded me. I did have one slight more thing. You've heard of Vitaligo, what Michael Jackson had, the skin condition where parts of your skin are lighter than others. I posted on Facebook there was this young woman who has Vitaligo on her arms. And she finally just got a tattoo and lovely script on her

forearm that said it's called the Vitaligo. Awesome. And I posted about this. And then she apparently listens to the show. And she posted, thanks for sharing this, guys. Awesome, that's great. Yeah, I thought it was kind of neat. But I'm curious to hear from people that have, I can't

remember what they call them in the studies, novel. Novel biological effectors. Right, basically something unusual physically that people might be prone to stare at. I want to hear from people and how you deal with that or if you've gotten used to it or if you think it is super rude. Or if you're like, yeah, I would stare at me, too. Yeah, but that is a great call out.

And let's see listener mail and then we'll hit it up again. All right. Hola, todos. My name is Amy. And I'm an English teacher living abroad in Malaga, Spain. I'm a recent fan and only discovered your podcast when I was desperate for something to listen to on the Metro Rides.

That's why everybody comes to us out of desperation. The first podcast I'll listen to is How Nazis Invaded Florida. And I haven't stopped downloading. Now the real reason I'm sending the email is a little strange. I teach many adult classes. My students are always asking how they can practice

listening to native speakers. Many people don't know that in Spain, all of the American or English TV series or movies are dubbed. I did not know that in Spanish voiceover. I didn't know that either. I figured a high percentage would be, but not all of them. So there aren't many options to practice listening skills. Once I got addicted to your show, I started suggesting that

my higher level students listen to you guys as well. I honestly didn't think many of them would actually go home and start listening. However, I was wrong. And this is in all caps. Every single one of them are now addicted like me. That's so awesome. And then back to regular, non-all caps.

So thanks, guys. My students want me to send an email to say thank you for speaking slow, but not too slow, and using a vocabulary that makes any topic of science, astrophysics, biology, and history easy to understand. I've noticed a big change in their listening skills and even have the entertainment of teaching some puns and slang that you both say on the show.

That makes class much more enjoyable. The only bad side is now they want a tour of the UK. So we can all come to see you guys live. That's so cool. See, everybody in the United States, you guys aren't coming to St. Louis. They can't possibly come see you. People are talking about traveling from Spain to

England to see yes. Seriously. Come on. Don't go to Milwaukee. I'm in Madison. Right! Keep on shelling out this podcast. And gracias por todo.

Hasta luego. Amy Culver. Amy, thank you for that. I love that email. That's a great email. Hasta la vista de your class. Thank you very much for writing in. And that's wonderful.

Hope you guys keep listening. We're known for our slang, aren't we? Get on the trolley, Chuck. Yeah, that old thing. If you want to get in touch with us to say hi in another language, that's cool. But like Chuck said, we want to hear from you if you have a novel biological effector and get stared at in what you do

in dealing with that. You can tweet to us at SOSKpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of

the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance

Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.