‘Big Brother’ eyes make us act more honestly

[Celebration]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9424-big-brother-eyes-make-us-act-more-honestly.html

We all know the scene: the departmental coffee room, with the price list for tea and coffee on the wall and the “honesty box” where you pay for your drinks – or not, because no one is watching.

In a finding that will have office managers everywhere scurrying for the photocopier, researchers have discovered that merely a picture of watching eyes nearly trebled the amount of money put in the box.

Melissa Bateson and colleagues at Newcastle University, UK, put up new price lists each week in their psychology department coffee room. Prices were unchanged, but each week there was a photocopied picture at the top of the list, measuring 15 by 3 centimetres, of either flowers or the eyes of real faces. The faces varied but the eyes always looked directly at the observer.

In weeks with eyes on the list, staff paid 2.76 times as much for their drinks as in weeks with flowers. “Frankly we were staggered by the size of the effect,” Gilbert Roberts, one of the researchers, told New Scientist.

[lectrobyte]

1. Wonderful. Now we'll have a larger-than-life-size pics of eyes all

over the place...

[TechBear_Seattle]

2. As opposed to the Junta's hidden cameras n/t

[Random_Australian]

3. The best thing would be "Larger than life posters, of a man with a

thick moustache hiding his facial expression, and to keep both the sense of bieng watched & adding a family commitment, it has the comment 'Big Brother is watching you' underneath"

I would be :rofl: :rofl:

[shugh514]

4. We can start

by wallpapering the Oval Office.:)

[lectrobyte]

6. Excellent suggestion! Seconded!

[MADem]

5. Hell, Saddam did this shit for years!

His pic was EVERYWHERE....watching!!!!!!

[Orrex]

7. This technology is already in use on the internets

Check it out for yourself here.