'Big Brother' Eyes Make Us Act More Honestly 399
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?"
wow. (Score:4, Interesting)
if you're not doing anything wrong, why should you mind being watched?
Monitored Transactions (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Monitored Transactions (Score:4, Interesting)
The fake camera [fakecameras.com] gag has been around for quite a while....proof that it works.
What's surprising, however, is that a mere picture of watching eyes also works, despite the fact that no person could have possibly thought the eyes were real.
It gets better (or worse) (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Panopticon (Score:5, Interesting)
The illusion of surveillance is as powerful as surveillance itself.
Replacing God (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Humanizing the Coffee Fund (Score:5, Interesting)
BTW, interesting mental manipulation experiment
Re:Monitored Transactions (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Neighborhood Crime Watch (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Somebody's known this for a LONG time... (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Wal-Mart does this, I think. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.)
Mmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
I suspect that these things will be removed once the various local governments realize they're affecting ticket revenues.
Ive seen it too (Score:2, Interesting)
-instantly- I had people coming to ask for my help fixing the printer.
Re:I always put change in the box. (Score:3, Interesting)
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".
Re:wow. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Angry librarian. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 :)
Re:Monitored Transactions (Score:3, Interesting)
"Sorry dude, your pictures are in Texas by now. Put the gun down and walk out and we won't prosecute, but you could nuke the entire block and you wouldn't get rid of that footage."
Or just claim you've done that. Might work, might not.
Re:Wal-Mart does this, I think. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Points out some of the negative aspects of priv (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Humanizing the Coffee Fund (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Humanizing the Coffee Fund (Score:2, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org]
Re:why not just use google to be a big brother (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Monitored Transactions (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:wow. (Score:3, Interesting)
What a weird question.
"If you aren't doing anything wrong, why should you mind being hit on the head?"
The reasons why being watched bothers us is built deeply into our monkey brains. Most chimpanzees, most of the time, need some privacy. So do most humans. If this were not the case, we wouldn't have stalls in public toilets and the like.
Beyond that, of course, is the kind of answer you're trolling for, which is so obvious and has been repeated so often that it really isn't worth mentioning again.