Well, it could have been Parag Y. Shah and Greg A. Hudson, both Class of 2002, who were watching you.
For eight hours this spring, the two watched as people went to the ATM at Cambridge Trust in Holyoke Center and took money out of their accounts.
But the two did not have sinister intentions. Rather, they were trying to prove that people would act like chimpanzees when they went to an ATM.
"I watched people at ATMs to see how much they scanned their surroundings and related it back to how chimps scanned for predators," Shah says.
Sitting comfortably at tables outside Au Bon Pain, the two split up the duties of collecting data on about 250 people with Shah checking for scanners and Hudson focusing on whether people went inside or outside. Both considered the size of the group in collecting data.
"I found that lone individuals went inside more than groups," Hudson says. "They were willing to open the door for the extra safety."
Shah's results showed that lone people scanned their surroundings about twice as often as those with groups.
On one particular night there was an outside factor that led to an increase in scanning, Shah says.
"There was one crazy hippie guy singing [Edwin Starr's] 'War' while banging on a mailbox," Shah says. "People were looking around at him."