Subtle cues of being watched increase generosity by 55 percent.

Evidence

Kevin Haley and Dan Fessler put this idea to a strong test. They wanted to go beyond previous experiments on lack of anonymity and repeated interactions and show that even subtle cues of being watched are enough to elicit nice behavior. It should be possible to “trick” the powerful and automatic gaze detection mechanism by exposing people to drawings that mimic the presence of human gaze. In the first stage of their experiment, they covertly exposed some US participants to drawings of human eyes masquerading as an ordinary computer screensaver, while others in the control group saw a screensaver with no stimuli or irrelevant stimuli unrelated to eyes. Then in the second stage, which participants thought was an unrelated experiment, they played a version of the one-shot Dictator Game (similar to the one used by Zhong and colleagues, discussed earlier). In this game, everyone was given a certain amount of money and had the opportunity to transfer any portion of the money to a stranger who was unable to retaliate, and was kept anonymous from the participant. There was a 55 percent increase in generosity after exposure to human eyes. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 89

Categorization

• XREF: This directly feeds the reader’s analytical bridge between Norenzayan’s Big God mechanism and Rodrigues’ perceived omniscient gaze in Silence — the automatic gaze-detection trigger is the psychological substrate.
• QUESTION: How does the 55 percent effect size compare to the explicit surveillance primes in the silent-film eyes church donation studies reported elsewhere in this chapter?