Minimal eye-like dot patterns activate face recognition and curb selfishness

Evidence

People are so sensitive to social monitoring that even schematic representations of eyes can change behavior in a more prosocial direction. This hypervigilance can be seen even when people are merely looking at three black dots arranged to look like a schematic face with eyes (in the form of an upside-down triangle standing on its pointed tip). Psychologist Mary Rigdon and her colleagues took advantage of the fact that such a configuration is known to weakly but consistently activate the face-recognition (or fusiform) area of the brain. They randomly assigned some of their US participants to look at this configuration, while other participants were randomly assigned to a control condition, where they also saw identical three black dots, but in a triangular configuration, which does not suggest a face or gazing eyes. All participants then played the Dictator Game. Despite being a very subtle social cue, exposure to a watching-eyes configuration tempered selfishness. Only 25 percent of participants who saw dots configured to look like a face gave nothing (the selfish strategy), whereas 40 percent of the control participants chose this strategy. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 90

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: The fusiform face-area activation chain connects to the reader’s gaze-detection mechanism question: the perceptual module fires on minimal schema, so the perceived observer need not be real.

Related

• Even three dots suggesting eyes reduce selfish behavior in economic games. (similarity 0.88)
• Eyes are psychologically privileged over faces in attention (similarity 0.84)
• Subtle cues of being watched increase generosity by 55 percent. (similarity 0.82)
• Eye detection is an ancient, automatic evolutionary adaptation for reputation monitoring (similarity 0.80)
• Merely depicting eyes increases generosity by 55 percent (similarity 0.79)