Some evidence suggests that people behave more cooperatively and generously when observed or in the presence of images of eyes (termed the ‘watching eyes’ effect); replication failed

Rotella A, Sparks AM, Mishra S, Barclay P (2021) No effect of ‘watching eyes’: An attempted replication and extension investigating individual differences. PLoS ONE 16(10): e0255531. Oct 6 2021. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0255531

Abstract: Some evidence suggests that people behave more cooperatively and generously when observed or in the presence of images of eyes (termed the ‘watching eyes’ effect). Eye images are thought to trigger feelings of observation, which in turn motivate people to behave more cooperatively to earn a good reputation. However, several recent studies have failed to find evidence of the eyes effect. One possibility is that inconsistent evidence in support of the eyes effect is a product of individual differences in sensitivity or susceptibility to the cue. In fact, some evidence suggests that people who are generally more prosocial are less susceptible to situation-specific reputation-based cues of observation. In this paper, we sought to (1) replicate the eyes effect, (2) replicate the past finding that people who are dispositionally less prosocial are more responsive to observation than people who are more dispositionally more prosocial, and (3) determine if this effect extends to the watching eyes effect. Results from a pre-registered study showed that people did not give more money in a dictator game when decisions were made public or in the presence of eye images, even though participants felt more observed when decisions were public. That is, we failed to replicate the eyes effect and observation effect. An initial, but underpowered, interaction model suggests that egoists give less than prosocials in private, but not public, conditions. This suggests a direction for future research investigating if and how individual differences in prosociality influence observation effects.

Check also Stylized and photographic eye images do not increase charitable donations in a field experiment. Paul Lennon, Rachel Grant, and V. Tamara Montrose. Letters on Evolutionary Behavioral Science, Vol 8, No 2 (2017). https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/09/stylized-and-photographic-eye-images-do.html

Discussion

This study examined if people were more prosocial in public, under “watching eyes”, or in a control condition with no-eyes. We failed to replicate the previously reported eyes and observation effects. Our results suggest that prosocial disposition (as measured by social value orientation) relates to responses to reputational incentives, where SVO prosocials gave similar amounts in both public and private conditions, but SVO egoists give less than prosocials in private conditions. Only SVO was a consistent predictor of dictator game donations, with prosocials giving more than egoists. Below we discuss each of these results and study limitations.

Failed replications: Observation and ‘watching eyes’ effects

Our manipulation check found that participants felt more observed in the public condition compared to both the eyes and no eyes conditions, suggesting that our public manipulation worked. Despite this, participants did not give more in the dictator game in the public condition compared to the eyes and control conditions. That is, we did not find an observation effect. This result was surprising, given that many prior studies suggests that people are more generous when they are being watched [6–9,11–16,39].

Based on the effect size for watching eyes in a prior study using similar methodology (i.e., short exposure to eyespots; Cohen’s f of .21 [23]), our sample of 355 participants would have given us 95% power to detect the eyes effect and observation effect. Despite this, we did not replicate the canonical “watching eyes” effect. Thus, our first prediction was not supported.

Our result is consistent with several recent failed replications [33–39]. Notably, a recent meta-analysis argues that eyes effects are effective at reducing antisocial behavior, with the speculation that images of eyes may be more effective at reducing bad behaviours than increasing good ones [32]. Watching eyes may not be particularly effective at increasing prosocial behaviours.

Reputation and social value orientation

In our pre-registered analysis, egoists did not give less than prosocials across all three conditions. However, we conducted an exploratory analysis where we combined the no eyes control condition and eyes condition into a single private condition to replicate the analyses in a prior study [39]. Although the overall analysis did not reach statistical significance, egoists gave less than prosocials in private conditions, but not in public conditions. This finding is consistent with the prior study [39], where proselfs (egoists and competitors combined) contributed less in private conditions, whereas prosocials did not. This result suggests that egoists give less than prosocials in a dictator game when anonymous. When comparing dictator game allocations among egoists in public and private conditions we did not find any differences. Given that egoists give less than prosocials in anonymous conditions, this suggests that the strategic motives of egoists are different than that of prosocials. Notably, this analysis was underpowered and we cannot draw definitive conclusions whether SVO relates to responses to observation.

Although we had a larger sample in this study compared to Simpson and Willer (2008; [39]), they used a decision with consequences as their primary dependent measure (i.e., participants were informed that a third party could see their decision and use it to inform a subsequent decision). Their manipulation was likely stronger than a decision without consequences, as employed in the present study. It is worth noting, however, that our study was underpowered to find this effect; we could not match the SVOs of approximately 44% of participants due to an error in survey administration. Nevertheless, this is the third study suggesting that SVO may relate to responses to reputation-relevant stimuli and emotions; future studies should continue to investigate the role of individual differences in reputation-based responses.

Notably, our results are suggestive of gender effects in response to reputation-based cues. Researchers have previously proposed gender differences in prosociality [57,58], though see meta-analysis in [59], and recent research finds that people expect women to be more prosocial than men [58]. These findings suggest that there may be gender differences in reputational costs/benefits for acting prosocial in public contexts, which should be further investigated.

Limitations

The most notable limitation in this study is our sample size. Although our sample was sufficient to replicate the observation and eyes effects, given prior samples (we had 95% power), we could not match the SVOs to their in-lab data of for a large proportion of participants, limiting our ability to draw conclusions about how SVO influences participants responses to reputation-based cues. These results should therefore be interpreted with caution. Despite this limitation, our sample size is much larger than those included in the original study (189 participants, compared to 89 and 70 in two studies [39]). This larger sample can provide a more accurate effect size to estimate power and sample sizes for future studies.

Another possible limitation to our study is that participants gave close to ceiling in the dictator game (i.e., $5) in all conditions (overall M = 4.06, SD = 2.00; all medians = 5), which may have limited our ability to find an observation effect. In fact, 62.4% of participants gave at ceiling in the public condition, and 53.6% in the private condition. However, prior research on eyes effects with a dictator game also found high allocations in the control condition (i.e., $4 out of $10) and found that images of watching eyes increased dictator game allocations beyond $4 [23]. Given that our study used similar methodology as Sparks and Barclay (2013) [23], we can conclude that we failed to replicate the eyes effect in this study. Participants did not report feeling more observed in the presence of eyes and did not give more money in a dictator game when images of eyes were present compared to the control condition. We also failed to replicate an observation effect, despite people feeling more observed in the public condition compared to the control condition, which suggests that people may not always increase cooperation when there are reputational incentives. Notably, many studies investigating observation and eyes effects do not include manipulation checks to confirm if participants feel observed. Future research could investigate when and why we would expect observation effects to occur and should include manipulation checks to confirm the experimental manipulation.

Additionally, people in our anonymous control condition (i.e., no eyes control) reported feeling somewhat observed, likely because they were in a lab environment, where there are some cues of observation such as the presence of other participants and the experimenter [59,60]. Although participants in the public condition reported feeling more observed than those in the control and eyes conditions, their scores were close to the midpoint of the scale, which suggests that participants in the public condition didn’t feel particularly observed. Notably, perceptions of observability were not correlated with dictator game allocations (see supplementary material).

A recent meta-analysis found that decisions with consequences—where participants expected their behaviours to influence how others will respond to them within the experimental protocol—produced larger observation effects on economic game allocations than decisions without consequence (rs of 0.25 and 0.12 respectively; [14]). The dictator game decision in this experiment was a decision without consequence, which may have limited the strength of our manipulation. However, studies using similar methodologies in small group sessions (as in this study) have reported eyes effects [20,23]. We also note that the ‘revelation moment’ differed between the eyes condition and public condition. In the eyes condition, reputational cues (eyes) were revealed right before the dictator game decision, whereas in the public condition participants were told more in advance that others would see their decisions, but the decisions were only made known to others after all decisions were made. Although both of these conditions are comparable to our control condition, these methodological differences may alter participants’ response patterns and should be considered when designing future studies.

Moreover, there are methodological similarities between SVO measures and the dictator game, where both measures ask participants to divide resources. In the present experiment, a key difference is that the dictator game is incentivized and continuous, while the SVO task is a series of hypothetical forced-choice scenarios. A conceptual replication with another measure of prosocial (or antisocial) behavior is needed to determine the generalizability of how SVO relates to prosocial behaviors.

Given the limitations outlined above, future research should investigate individual differences in observation and ‘watching eyes’ effects using dependent measures with greater reputational benefits or costs (see [32]). Moreover, future studies could use the SVO slider measure [47], as opposed to the triple-dominance measure employed in the present study. The SVO slider measure is a continuous measure as opposed to categorical, allowing a more precise classification of participants’ level of SVO [47]. However, SVO is a narrow personality construct, which may limit the ability to detect individual differences in reputation-based effects. Future studies could also examine if broader personality constructs, such as HEXACO Honesty-Humility or Agreeableness [58] are associated with differential response to reputation-based cues.

Contributions

This study adds to the literature in several ways. Using established methodology, our aggregate data provide a well-powered attempted replication of the eyes effect (which excludes individual difference data based on SVO). Additionally, our results are suggestive that individual differences may influence how people respond to reputation-based cues. These findings are in the same direction as Simpson and Willer’s (2008; [39]) finding that people who are less prosocial (i.e., SVO egoists) are more likely to calibrate their decisions according to reputation-based cues, whereas SVO prosocials are consistently prosocial. Although our study was underpowered to detect individual differences, our sample size is much larger than the original study [39]. These results can inform future research methodologies; future studies should use observation manipulation with consequences, broader personality variables, and a dependent measure with higher reputational benefits or costs to participants to investigate reputation-based effects.