 Image from www.makezine.com. |
Big Brother Is Watching |
Wired Science online announced the results of a Newcastle University psychology study today where posters asking restaurant customers to pick up after themselves were displayed with two different designs. The message was the same on both posters, but one had a picture of flowers while the other had a staring eye. The result? People were twice as likely to clean up their messes when the staring eye was used.
The article claims that the study was testing the theory of “nudge psychology”, which posits that people behave “better” (whatever that means) when the “better” option is pointed out to them. I think in this case the experimental assumptions might be flawed. Isn’t it possible that, in a society where we have been bombarded all our lives with the understanding that someone is always watching us (God, the government, whoever’s on the other side of my web camera, the camera on the traffic light on the corner), being stared at, even subliminally by the image of an eye, might do something to keep us reflexively honest?
