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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?"
straight out of 1984.
if you're not doing anything wrong, why should you mind being watched?
I'm not surprised by this at all.
I once was very good friends with a card shop owner. In the back two corners of his store, he had two very huge obtrusive obnoxious surveillance cameras angled into the store. I had been in the back of the store to play cards with him every now and then and had never seen any television sets. So I asked him one day where the feeds went on his cameras so that he could catch people shoplifting. He just laughed and told me that the feeds didn't need to go anywhere. And if I looked closer, those cameras were fake.
I would suspect that anything symbolizing or triggering our mind to think of surveillance would cause us to be more honest. It would be interesting to instead of eyes use pictures of surveillance cameras pointed at the coffee. Or, perhaps simply the words, "We are watching you!" I mean, it's only natural for us to react to what we see.
My work here is dung.
Ever heard of a Wank Séance? Big Brother ain't got nothing on dead ancestors, when it comes to guilt. Anyway...
I used to work in a store, and tried the ol' "leave a fake dollar bill" joke on people once in a while, their reactions were both interesting and hilarious. It seemed that no one would pick it up when left within our view. If it was in front of the cash register, they wouldn't reach down and grab it straight out. They would linger around it for a while, investigating it. Very funny. Now, I was about 15 when I had this job, hardly an authority figure. But, that "They Are Watching Me" feeling was still present.
Kind of a similar theory presented in the Panopticon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon)
The illusion of surveillance is as powerful as surveillance itself.
This is one thing that the concept of God used to be used for - the all seeing eye that made some people act (somewhat) honestly. Now that religion is on the wane in parts of the world, a replacement all seeing eye will be needed to keep the same class of people in line.
Now I'd like to see the efficiency of feminine smiling eyes vs male concerned eyes.
BTW, interesting mental manipulation experiment
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Those signs around some neighborhoods for the neighborhood crime watch don't seem to work all that well....
Nobody said it was 100% effective. Maybe the signs are working quite well. Take the signs down for a few weeks and report if anything has changed. The signs are put up where there is an existing problem. Where there is never any problem, there are rarely any signs because they are not needed.
The truth shall set you free!
Looked at the back of a dollar bill lately?
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Since Big Brotheresque things are associated with arbitrary abuse by seemingly unaccountable authorities who are also unaccountable if they retaliate later, people get afraid. How many human resources departments have written a person up for saying something that got taken the wrong way by a thin-skinned person? Look at how shop-lifting by young teens is treated. Do it 25 years ago and it's a sound whack on the wrist. Today, it ruins your future no matter if you go into the army and become a decorated war hero serving on the front lines.
And the GOVERNMENT side of Big Brother has left more "little brothers" dead than all religious organizations and private corporations combined.
So yeah, it doesn't a rocket scientists to figure out why in the modern world Big Brother is considered scary. In fact, I would consider it a form of psychotic detatchment from reality to be comfortable with him.
A lot of big box stores do similar things. Look up at the cieling of your friendly local neighborhood Wal-Mart sometime. You'll see those black camera domes sticking down about every 20 feet or so.
I did an estimate once, and in the Super Wal-Mart in my area, there would have literally been hundreds of cameras. While perhaps they're all real (if anyone would take surveillance to that obsessive a level, it would be Wally World), they don't all need to be. They could just have 25% or 50% of them actually set up with a camera inside, and the rest just empty black domes. Since you'll never know which ones are cameras and which ones are fake, you have to assume (if you're going to do any kind of significant shoplifting) that they're all real.
Of course, the semi-intelligent person realizes that with that many cameras, and with the staffing levels at places like Wal-Mart, they can't possibly be actively watching all the cameras, all the time, particularly if every dome on the cieling was real...even viewed through multiplexers, each camera is only being monitored for a small fraction of the time it's on. (Unless there are warehouses full of people somewhere, staring at the live feeds; come to think if it, I wouldn't put that past Wal-Mart.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I suspect that these things will be removed once the various local governments realize they're affecting ticket revenues.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Im the network admin here, and I got sick and tired of people trying to fix the printer and clear paper jams on thier own, since they rarely did so properly and often took half the machine apart and broke things causing extended downtine. Administrativly I have no "teeth" to make them stop (they dont know this) so I just put up a non-functional camera on the wall up in the corner pointed at the printer.
-instantly- I had people coming to ask for my help fixing the printer.
I always pay up at the coffee pot, for I fear one day there won't be any!
Indeed, most people are this honest. That's not just a gut feeling either. According to an extensive study cited in the book Freakanomics done with the help of bagel salesmen Feldman who would leave bagels with a locked donation box next to them in many office buildings, and have a sign asking for a dollar, roughly 89% of office workers would pay up. 89% is not bad at all for payment when no one is watching. Their detailed analysis of what makes people pay more (9/11) or less (big, unfriendly offices) was interesting. See Freakonomics, p. 48 (can use Amazon's 'search inside' for the quick fix).
So why does the article say the pay rate "trebled"? Probably because they weren't asking correctly in the first case -- i.e. they just had a sign saying "pitch in whatever you feel like" instead of "Please pay $0.50 for each cup or we won't be able to provide it any longer".
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Wow. That's a whole other experiment right there, we're all seeing different things. To me, they didn't look concerned, hurt, or angry. In fact, it looks rather devoid of any strong emotions. Like the look you get if you happen to ask the stranger next to you what time it is (when he's actually telling you, not when he's initially surprised that you talked to him).
I'm an EE, not a psychologist or anything, but I'm guessing that since we can't see the rest of the face, we don't have enough cues to determine the emotion, and we're filling in the blanks differently based on some type of inner expectations. That sounds really interesting, someone should look into it if they haven't already :)
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
We are social animals
I think that's exactly what's going wrong. We're not animals. By reducing us to animals, you deny our self-consciousness which enables us to reflect on our own actions. But even under that assumption, you could see conscience as a particularly strong neural connection between unacceptable behaviour and punishment (or absence of unacceptable behaviour and gratification). The result is the right behaviour even when you are not watched. I think that would serve us as a society and individuals much better than any system where we're under permanent surveillance.
You could not plot
You wouldn't need to. Pervasive majority rule is a problem even if the majority is unmanipulated. I like to think of it in terms of algorithms: Think of society as a program trying to solve problems. Obviously it's a heuristic program. There are certain heuristics which do better than others because they don't rule out small negative deviations. This property enables them to reach solutions which are globally better, whereas a heuristic which only considers improvements might only reach a local optimum. A society without protected space for dissent rules out negative developments and can't reach a better solution because the local optimum is surrounded by such negative developments. I believe that war happens when a society is locked into such a local optimum. Consequently I believe that dissent and deviation is a prerequisite to a free (and peaceful) society.
That was modded to Funny but this is actually insightful.
The eyes working only works because there is only one pair, watching the coffee pot, and that's it.
You -can't- apply it generally and make society more honest by wall-papering the city with eyes; that's equivalent to the trees that scream all the for no good reason.
We would rapidly become completely desensitized to them.
It's called the Kuleshov Effect.
The percieved emotion in a blank face is very easily manipulated, and if the eyes in the coffee room looked angry or sad to you, then you probably got a little glimpse into your character.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_Experiment
the thing about big brother was that you could see the face of the person watching you so you knew you were being watched...
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but CCTV is just a camera and you don't know if anyone is paying attention
speaking of which there is a neat google hack that you can look at unsecured video cameras around the world. most of this are just public web cams people setup. most are in Japan or in Europe and even some of them have movable cameras
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=inurl%3A%22V
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=intitle%3A%2
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