Nobody's watching? Subtle cues affect generosity in an anonymous economic game.

By K. Haley, Daniel M.T. Fessler. 2005

1,148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c8f4b2695333abafde9ea253afc5b6a651d1fb54

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Citations in the corpus

The psychology of coordination and common knowledge. (2014, background): “Altruistic and reputational motives have been well documented in social psychology and experimental economics (e.g., Haley & Fessler, 2005; Messick & McClintock, 1968; Milinski, Semmann, & Krambeck, 2002; Van Lange, 1999).”
Dictator game giving: altruism or artefact? (2008, background): “See, for examples, Eckel and Grossman (1996) on anonymity and charities versus individuals as recipients, Hoffman et al. (1996) and Bohnet and Frey (1999) on social distance, Cherry et al. (2002) on earned versus unearned income, and Haley and Fessler (2005) on visual suggestions of observation.”
Effects of eye images on everyday cooperative behavior: a field experiment (2011, methodology): “Instead, it seems likely that the psychological mechanisms controlling decisions about whether to behave cooperatively are specifically responsive to cues which usually indicate social scrutiny, as suggested by Haley and Fessler (2005).”
Anticipated verbal feedback induces altruistic behavior (2008, background): “Even pictures of eyes, subtly triggering a sense of being watched, has a significant positive impact on generosity in both laboratory experiments (Haley and Fessler, 2005) and field settings (Bateson, Nettle, and Roberts, 2006).”
Nice Guys Finish First: The Competitive Altruism Hypothesis (2006, background): “Previous research has shown that even in anonymous situations in the laboratory, participants feel that they are being watched and, as a result, act more altruistically (Hayley & Fessler, 2005).”
Moral Reputation: An Evolutionary and Cognitive Perspective (2012, methodology): “‘Our results,’ they write, ‘challenge the claim that […] prosocial behaviour in anonymous noniterated economic games cannot be explained with reference to reputational factors’ (Haley & Fessler, 2005: 284).”
The watching eyes phenomenon: The role of a sense of being seen and public self‐awareness (2015, background): “…that can be observed in the human species (Kropotkin, 1902/1972; Ridley, 1996) appears in that individuals not only behave differently under actual presence of others but also when subtle cues of being watched (i.e., stylized watching eyes) are present in the environment (Haley & Fessler, 2005).”
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).”
Do sincere apologies need to be costly? Test of a costly signaling model of apology (2009, neutral): “game structures in the EEA (Hagen & Hammerstein, 2006; Haley & Fessler, 2005 ).”
Processing of social and monetary rewards in the human striatum. (2008, background): “For example, human subjects were motivated to present themselves in a positive manner or to engage in prosocial behaviors when their perception of being watched by others was enhanced (Bateson et al., 2006; Haley and Fessler, 2005; Kurzban et al., 2007; Paulhus, 1984).”
Cues of being watched enhance cooperation in a real-world setting (2006, background): “…our experimental conditions, the human perceptual system contains neurons that respond selectively to stimuli involving faces and eyes (Emery 2000; Haxby et al. 2000), and it is therefore possible that the images exerted an automatic and unconscious effect on the participants' perception that…”
Effects of personification and anthropomorphic tendency on destination attitude and travel intentions (2017, background): “…attachment (Chandler & Schwarz, 2010), the conferral of moral rights (Waytz, Epley, & Cacioppo, 2010b), more pro-social behavior like generosity (Haley & Fessler, 2005), and other behaviors, such as intending to behave in a way consistent with the anthropomorphized agent (Aggarwal &McGill,…”
The Psychology of Charitable Donations to Disaster Victims and Beyond (2015, background): “In fact, the donor need not be consciously aware of the eye image (Haley & Fessler, 2005).”