Why being noticed and being watched are two very different things

In the famous study that gave rise to the term “the Hawthorne effect”, researchers early last century measured the productivity of workers in a factory near Chicago in varying amounts of light.

Legend has it that the researchers were surprised to discover that productivity increased whether the lighting was strong or dim. The reason? The important variable, more than the lighting, was the fact that the workers realised they were being watched.

This pointed to a truism, known only too well by performing artists and sportspeople: we act differently when we know people are watching.

Being watched, which can have sinister connotations, is quite different to being noticed. One suggests distance; the other, however fleetingly, a connection.

The line separating noticing from watching can at times be fuzzy. This article was mostly written in a “white space” café in Kyoto, where I was holidaying, where customers are seated in a tiered square formation so that they become both the watchers and the watched. Inadvertent glances can easily linger and become staring. But usually, it’s clear which side of the line you’re on.

We can communicate a lot by noticing, and by being seen to notice, all of which can be extraordinarily subtle.

There’s a terrific line in Patrick deWitt’s The Librarianist – itself a beautiful book about noticing the apparently unremarkable life of the central character, Bob. When a woman arrives at Bob’s house, possibly to stay, deWitt writes that “she arrived at Bob’s house with a suspiciously large shoulder bag, which Bob noticed and was noticed noticing”.

Noticing can take the form of bearing witness, which of course has a long religious tradition both in the sense of bearing witness to the truth, but also as an essential precursor to remediating a harm.

At the everyday level, not being noticed can have adverse consequences for us. Isolation and loneliness are significant social harms which, when you boil them down, are manifestations of people not being noticed.