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'Big Brother' Eyes Make Us Act More Honestly
dylanduck quotes a NewScientist.com article that says "We all know the scene: the coffee room with the 'honesty box' where you pay for your drinks — or not, because no one is watching. But researchers have discovered that merely a picture of watching eyes trebled the amount of money paid." That's a pretty deep-rooted fear of getting caught, which could be useful for crime prevention perhaps. But whose eyes?"
I always pay up at the coffee pot, for I fear one day there won't be any! Then I'll be out $2 a cup from $LOCAL_CHAIN. Don't bite the hand that caffeinates you!
Cthulhu Saves.
I think the important thing here is the possibility that these eyes could be giving the coffee fund a human feature.
It's entirely possible that the people who were just taking coffee before thought the coffee fund to be more of a faceless corporate operation run by management at their company. Perhaps they thought they weren't paid enough and so it was 'ok' to take coffee.
They didn't feel like they were doing something wrong because they could easily justify their free coffee--plus it made them work harder! Even better for the company providing it.
If you look at the eyes, they look very concerned and hurt. I think that this probably triggered emotions of the coffee fund being an employee thing and you weren't taking coffee from the company but your fellow man. That's why this is interesting and that's why I don't think that the people who were taking coffee ever thought they were really doing something wrong.
My work here is dung.
There's a pretty common thread in ethics training that goes something like this: your character is determined by what you do when no one is watching.
I'm not sure if that's right or wrong, but the picture of the watching eyes is apparently a powerful prompt to pay for the drinks. It's a reminder that someone could be watching (but isn't), so what will you do?
It's also possible that the 'tripling effect' results from the people who think "Oh, I'll pay it later" actually remembering to pay rather than the people who never pay actually turning over a new leaf.
It's interesting how just the image of human eyes "humanizes" the coffee fund. I was chatting with a professor friend who was complaining about how most of the boys in his classes wear baseball caps that prevent him from seeing most of their face, including their eyes. He felt that even subconsciously this affected their grades in a negative way. It bothered him that he didn't really know them. In fact he joked that mostly he knew their hats --- "the kid with the red hat with the black bill seems pretty good at derivatives."
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Let's put up more signs, straight out of the movie Brazil, They Live, and other fine sources:
SUSPICION BREEDS CONFIDENCE
REPORT YOUR NEIGHBOR
OBEY
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Actually I looked at the eyes and I didn't think they looked very concerned and hurt. I thought they looked pissed, honestly.
It's kind of an "angry librarian" complex, I think. You're not really sure what happens if you piss it off, but it might not be pleasant so you just avoid finding out.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I think it's pretty well established that people are more honest when they're being watched ;-).
What's interesting is that this suggests that it is one of those atavistic behaviors that happen below the conscious level. People often do more rationalization than action to suppport their self-image as honest, hard working folk.
Once I saw a cop make a good point in a talk about self-defense. Sure, if the mugger asks for your wallet, you give it to him. But the point where you must try to escape or fight is when he tells you to step off the sidewalk into the alley: he wants privacy to do something that he's not comfortable doing where he might be seen.
As an American, I value my privacy. But there is more than one way to run a society with respect to privacy. In some cultures, bathing or even crapping can be a communal activity. I can well imagine a "Goldfish Bowl" society in which everything anybody does is witnessed by everybody else. It would probably be the most virtuous society in history. The reason that tyranny immediate leaps to mind is that nobody ever proposes anything that radical. What they propose is that privacy be considered important in most cases (including their privacy), but not in yours. Like a mugger, they want privacy for themselves so they can do things to you. They want exposure for you so you can't do things back.
The lesson is that when your government wants to watch you but doesn't want you watching back, beware.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
But people are not being watched. They only feel like they are. Important distinction.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Humans are hardwired to focus on faces, or even just eyes.
Maybe the eyes were just more noticeable than a less "eye-catching" textual reminder to pay?
So the eyes made it less likely to forget the payment, but not because of guilt or fear, and a blinking light next to the notice would have the same effect?
Like Dante said in Clerks: "People see money on the counter and no one around, they think they're being watched."
Normally, I'd cite statistics of crime in neighborhoods with/without these programs, but that was too much work. So I decided to make an unfounded assertion and hope for +5 insightful!
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
straight out of 1984.
if you're not doing anything wrong, why should you mind being watched?
This is why I feel the Government should be very careful with this line of thought. I turn it right back on them. If the Government isn't doing anything wrong then why should they mind us watching them.
Democracy in action.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
I believe that privacy is a prerequisite to freedom. Your goldfish bowl society would indeed be a tyranny - of the majority. A free society is only sustainable with dissent. Without deviation from the majority rule, there is no way to adapt to new challenges. Dissent needs a time of protection until has grown strong enough that it can fend for itself.
It's an interesting point, but not one which follows with logical necessity. As a practical matter, any move towards a radically open society would be a step toward tyranny, because those with power would ensure that it is not done in an even handed way. It's more of a thought experiment.
However I don't think that a radically open society would logically have to be a tyranny, if we assume that nobody has any privacy at all. Because in that case every individual is a minority. It's like the nuclear doctrine of mutually assured destruction. You could not plot to go after those perverts who are attracted to women's shoes, because (a) those people would know you were plotting and (b) they would know you are a pervert who is wearing women's underwear while you are doing it. Persecution necessarily implies inequality: one party must be vulnerable, the other invulnerable. You could certainly try to go after people for being minorities, but they would know it and know your vulnerabilities.
Imagine information about people as being like a gun. It's a bad thing if only some people are allowed to have guns. If there were no guns at all (even in state hands) that's OK. And maybe if everyone has guns, on average it would be OK too, although bad things would happen from time to time as people acted with irrational hostility and in return got themselves shot in a vendetta.
The value of the thought experiment I think is this. If the freedom of the common man is important, then the privacy of the common man should be guarded closely, but the powerful should have no privacy, at least as bears on their actions that excercise power of the common people.
What happened to a concept called "conscience"? That strong urge to refrain from doing something because it feels wrong. You know that feeling, or don't you? That was an effective way of maintaining a level of cooperativeness. It made people honest without surveillance, but at the same time it was non-uniform enough to allow dissent to grow when necessary.
That simply is not true. We are social animals. The kind of theoretical ethics of personal principles are just that: theories. Our social behavior is governed by social rewards and punishments: loss or gain of status, acceptance, cooperation and so forth.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That activates the "shoot the smug, annoying, unarmed man" reaction.