Surveillance and Brain Function

Humans are incredibly sensitive to attention.

We’re predisposed to notice even a single person staring at us in a crowd of people who aren’t, our subconscious picking up on body movement, the whites of a person’s eyes, and other indicators that there is a potential social signal being cast our way.

Such attention can be a positive thing (noticing someone we find attractive scoping us out, for instance), but it can also make us feel uncomfortable, or even elicit a fight, flight, or freeze response.

Negatively valenced responses to being stared at are likely the result of another posited benefit of this predisposition: if we can subconsciously detect when we’re being watched, that means we’re more likely to notice when a predator is stalking us from the shadows.

Whatever the evolutionary origins of this ability, though, it’s been shown that being watched—especially if we know for certain it’s happening because there’s a sign saying so, or because someone’s standing next to us and clearly keeping tabs on our actions—causes us to engage in more pro-social behaviors (like donating money), makes us less likely to engage in antisocial behaviors (like littering), and makes us more likely to obey posted rules.

Interestingly, there’s also research that suggests being watched (and knowing it) makes us better at perceiving faces—which supports the hypothesis that this is partly a socially beneficial trait.

The takeaway from years of research into how humans respond to being watched, then, might be construed as implying we’re better off living in a panopticon in which we’re surveilled 24/7; that would mean everyone does more pro-social and less antisocial stuff, and obeys the rules, right?

Maybe. The downside of surveillance—and this has been the focus of more recent research than those earlier (somewhat pro-surveillance) studies—is that being watched actually wears on us, impairing our motivation and cognition, disrupting our working memory, messing with our visual-spatial imagination, and even impeding our language-processing capabilities.

So our bodies can become aware that we’re being watched before our conscious brains do, leading to that uncomfortable “hair on the back of our necks standing up” feeling, but it can also disrupt our brains’ capacity to do all sorts of things, probably because our cognitive resources are partially focused on addressing a potential threat or opportunity.

All of which is increasingly relevant in an age in which we’re persistently sharing aspects of our lives with other people on purpose, but also persistently under surveillance, both consciously and unconsciously, and across pretty much every aspect of modern life.