The Science of Staring

There are any number of things to gaze at while walking down a city street, but you can't stop and stare at them all or you'll never get where you want to go. If you just arrived from rural Idaho and it's your first trip to Times Square, that might be the point. But how do the rest of us decide when to break stride and look at whatever everyone else is looking at?

One of the earliest studies of crowd gazing was done by Stanley Milgrim on the streets of New York in the late 1960s. Milgrim had research actors, either alone or in groups of up to 15, stand on the sidewalk and look up at the window of a nearby building. Then he and colleagues determined the effect this behavior had on other pedestrians.