Surveillance Cues Enhance Moral Condemnation

Abstract

Humans pay close attention to the reputational consequences of their actions. Recent experiments indicate that even very subtle cues that one is being observed can affect cooperative behaviors. Expressing our opinions about the morality of certain acts is a key means of advertising our cooperative dispositions. Here, we investigated how subtle cues of being watched would affect moral judgments. We predicted that participants exposed to such cues would affirm their endorsement of prevailing moral norms by expressing greater disapproval of moral transgressions. Participants read brief accounts of two moral violations and rated the moral acceptability of each violation. Violations were more strongly condemned in a condition where participants were exposed to surveillance cues (an image of eyes interposed between the description of the violation and the associated rating scale) than in a control condition (in which the interposed image was of flowers). We discuss the role that public declarations play in the interpersonal evaluation of cooperative dispositions.

No evidence that a range of artificial monitoring cues influence online donations to charity in an MTurk sample

“…These stimuli include images of eyes almost identical to those used in past studies (e.g. [8,14–21,27,28]) and images of faces or the same face schematic previously shown to increase prosociality [14]. These findings do not allow us to test theoretical predictions regarding the relative efficacy of the different monitoring cues because none of the monitoring cues produced a significant effect on donation behaviour.…”

Increasing Visual Search Accuracy by Being Watched

“…In comparison to the present study using video-monitoring setups for the condition of being watched, more subtle cues of being watched (e.g., eye-like paintings or dots: [23]–[28], photocopied eyes: [17], [18], [20]–[22]) have been used in previous studies. This difference leads to a possibility that participants might also search more slowly and carefully when the eye-like paintings or photocopied eyes are superimposed on the background of the search display.…”

Big Gods can get in your head

“…A large body of evidence suggests that people do engage in more cooperative behaviors and are become less tolerant of misdemeanors when scrutinized, even with very subtle implicit cues Bourrat, Baumard, & McKay, 2011;Haley & Fessler, 2005), a phenomenon that appears early in development (Leimgruber, Shaw, Santos, & Olson, 2012). Conversely, people monitor other agents' behavior and intuitively estimate the potential costs and benefits of cooperating with them (Delton & Robertson, 2012).…”