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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 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.
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?
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