Slashdot Mirror
'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?
Maybe flowers make you pay less?
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
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.
Just so everyone will flush and wash their hands!
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
Is fear of getting caught a worse human trait than the tendency to be dishonest?
I'd like to think the better of my fellow man, but this story just tells me that I'm probably not being honest with myself.
Here's a picture suitable for posting on your refrigerator, to aid with dieting efforts. It combines the 'watching eyes' effect with the 'I'm gonna hurl' effect to maximize effect.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
A single eye, composed of orange flames, sitting atop a tall tower, emitting a large beam of light, like a lighthouse, should work pretty well.
Then again, it didn't work out too well the last time someone tried it.
Berserk Manga > All
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.
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.
http://www.ceilingcat.com/
...
I wonder if the effect is the same with cat's eyes
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.
Those of TJ Eckleburg, of course.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
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.
My dad lost an eye in WWII. He was a farmer in Kenya after the war, and would sometimes 'pop' his eye and leave it on a post to keep farm workers from slacking off. It worked well, until they figured out they just needed to put a hat over the eye.
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.
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.
I hardly ever pay for my drinks in regular coffee shops so why would I start paying in some honesty box?
We all know the scene, you go into the starbucks and order the double. Before paying you pretend you have to run to the washroom. When you get back the coffee is waiting for you so you snatch it and run out the door screaming "rape." Or you can just live here in Japan where some places you pay after you drink. In that case you pretend to go to the washroom after you finish your coffee and simply climb* out the window (shouting "rape").
* Note: There might be a bit of a fall if the shop is on the third floor**.
** This may or may not have been learned through experience.
-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.
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.
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?
now behave!
thats "trebled", not tripled ;)
I am certain that one as perspicacious as thou was not remiss in making proper use of thine Capitals and Punctuation when reprimanding yonder knave for his abuse of the King's English.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Not really, since sicko woodchoppers probably would take twice or triple the time to cut down a tree. I think they'd try to do it as slowly as they can, to enjoy it even more, IMO.
:P
I just can imagine what Greenpeace would do in situations where trees can scream.
This is getting soooo offtopic
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 . .
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.