Cues of being watched enhance cooperation in a real-world setting

By Melissa Bateson, Daniel Nettle, Gilbert Roberts. Biology Letters, 2006

1,229 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48f87acd5008375edd45c3632c65cc9ba7350fa0

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Citations in the corpus

Effects of religious setting on cooperative behavior: a case study from Mauritius (2013, background): “In fact, existing evidence suggests that they can all be expected to impact cooperative behavior (Ahmed & Salas, 2008; Bateson et al., 2006; Bering et al., 2005; Haley & Fessler, 2005; Malhotra, 2010; Randolph-Seng & Nielsen, 2007; Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007).”
Naturally Green: Harnessing Stone Age Psychological Biases to Foster Environmental Behavior (2014, background): “Research shows that even a pair of eyes displayed on a poster or computer screen can activate reputation concerns and make people behave more cooperatively (Bateson et al., 2006; Haley & Fessler, 2005).”
Artificial surveillance cues do not increase generosity: two meta-analyses (2017, background): “Finally, Bateson, Nettle, and Roberts (2006) investigated the effect of watching eyes on payments to an honesty box.”
Religion, self-regulation, and self-control: Associations, explanations, and implications. (2009, background): “Bateson, Nettle, and Roberts (2006) reported a conceptual replication with a sample of 48 faculty members in a British department of psychology who had the option to pay for tea, coffee, and milk in the break room via an " honesty box " that was decorated during alternate weeks with either pictures…”
Altruism toward in-group members as a reputation mechanism (2010, neutral): “A good example is found in a study by Bateson, Nettle and Roberts (2006), which demonstrated that users of a common coffee machine in an office voluntarily donated more money to maintain the supply of coffee when a poster of eyes was posted on the wall than when a poster of flowers was posted.”
A stated choice experiment to measure the effect of informational and normative conformity in the preference for electric vehicles (2017, methodology): “…contains neurons that respond selectively to stimuli involving faces and eyes”; then even if a person is not actually observed, the simple image of the eyes “exerted an automatic and unconscious effect on the participants’ perception that they were being watched” (Bateson et al. 2006, page 413).”
Sixteen common misconceptions about the evolution of cooperation in humans (2011, background): “Consequently, human cognitive abilities allow individuals to be highly flexible in the level of cooperation they perform in response to whether there is the possibility for punishment (Fehr & Gächter, 2002), cues of reciprocity (Bateson et al., 2006; Semmann et al., 2004), whether they are competing”
Eye to eye, face to face and brain to brain: novel approaches to study the behavioral dynamics and neural mechanisms of social interactions (2015, neutral): “Being looked at has profound effects on a human observer [11,12].”
Strategies for cooperation in biological markets, especially for humans (2013, background): “At other times this modulation could be unconscious, as when subtle cues of observation influence monetary donations and other forms of helpfulness (Bateson et al., 2006; Burnham & Hare, 2007; Ernest-Jones et al., 2011; Haley & Fessler, 2005).”