Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Eyes, More Than Other Facial Features, Enhance Real-World Donation Behavior

  • Published:
Human Nature Aims and scope Submit manuscript

A Correction to this article was published on 15 November 2018

This article has been updated

Abstract

Humans often behave more prosocially when being observed in person and even in response to subtle eye cues, purportedly to manage their reputation. Previous research on this phenomenon has employed the “watching eyes paradigm,” in which adults displayed greater prosocial behavior in the presence of images of eyes versus inanimate objects. However, the robustness of the effect of eyes on prosocial behavior has recently been called into question. Therefore, the first goal of the present study was to attempt to replicate this effect. Additionally, it remains unclear whether the watching-eyes effect is driven specifically by reputation management (owing to the monitoring function of the eyes) or whether any cues indexing human presence more generally also have a similar effect. To address these questions, the current study compared prosocial behavior in the presence of eyes versus inanimate objects as well as other human features. The study was conducted as a field experiment at a children’s museum. Each week, the donation signs were changed to show eyes, noses, mouths, or chairs. Total donation amount and number of patrons per week were recorded. Participants donated more when they were exposed to eyes than to inanimate objects (chairs). We thus replicated the previously reported watching-eyes effect. Moreover, more money was donated when individuals were exposed to eyes than to more general cues of human presence (nose and mouth). The current findings suggest that eyes play a special role in promoting cooperation in humans, likely by serving as cues of monitoring and thus eliciting reputation management behavior.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Similar content being viewed by others

Change history

Notes

  1. All of our results held when we used a one-way ANOVA with bootstrapping (10,000 replications) and performed post-hoc analyses with a Bonferroni correction.

  2. This analysis had an unequal number of cells: 14 in Nose + Mouth pooled vs. 7 in the Eyes condition. We therefore also conducted a nonparametric test, which revealed a very similar result: Mann-Whitney U = 18.00, p = .020).

References

  • Andreoni, J., & Petrie, R. (2004). Public goods experiments without confidentiality: A glimpse into fund-raising. Journal of Public Economics, 88(7), 1605–1623.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baillon, A., Selim, A., & Van Dolder, D. (2013). On the social nature of eyes: The effect of social cues in interaction and individual choice tasks. Evolution and Human Behavior, 34(2), 146–154.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bateson, M., Nettle, D., & Roberts, G. (2006). Cues of being watched enhance cooperation in a real-world setting. Biology Letters, 2(3), 412–414.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bateson, M., Callow, L., Holmes, J. R., Roche, M. L. R., & Nettle, D. (2013). Do images of “watching eyes” induce behaviour that is more pro-social or more normative? A field experiment on littering. PLoS One, 8(12), e82055.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brodeur, M. B., Guérard, K., & Bouras, M. (2014). Bank of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS) phase II: 930 new normative photos. PLoS One, 9(9), e106953.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bull, R., & Gibson-Robinson, E. (1981). The influences of eye-gaze, style of dress, and locality on the amounts of money donated to a charity. Human Relations, 34(10), 895–905.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Burnham, T. C., & Hare, B. (2007). Engineering human cooperation: Does involuntary neural activation increase public goods contributions? Human Nature, 18, 88–108.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carbon, C. C., & Hesslinger, V. M. (2011). Bateson et al.'s (2006) cues-of-being-watched paradigm revisited. Swiss Journal of Psychology, 70, 203–210.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ebner, N. C., Riediger, M., & Lindenberger, U. (2010). FACES—A database of facial expressions in young, middle-aged, and older women and men: Development and validation. Behavior Research Methods, 42(1), 351–362.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ekström, M. (2012). Do watching eyes affect charitable giving? Evidence from a field experiment. Experimental Economics, 15(3), 530–546.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Engelmann, J. M., Herrmann, E., & Tomasello, M. (2012). Five-year olds, but not chimpanzees, attempt to manage their reputations. PLoS One, 7(10), e48433.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ernest-Jones, M., Nettle, D., & Bateson, M. (2011). Effects of eye images on everyday cooperative behavior: A field experiment. Evolution and Human Behavior, 32(3), 172–178.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Farroni, T., Csibra, G., Simion, F., & Johnson, M. H. (2002). Eye contact detection in humans from birth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99(14), 9602–9605.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Farroni, T., Johnson, M. H., Menon, E., Zulian, L., Faraguna, D., & Csibra, G. (2005). Newborns' preference for face-relevant stimuli: Effects of contrast polarity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(47), 17245–17250.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fathi, M., Bateson, M., & Nettle, D. (2014). Effects of watching eyes and norm cues on charitable giving in a surreptitious behavioral experiment. Evolutionary Psychology, 12(5), 878–887.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fehr, E., & Gächter, S. (2002). Altruistic punishment in humans. Nature, 415(6868), 137–140.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fehr, E., & Schneider, F. (2010). Eyes are on us, but nobody cares: Are eye cues relevant for strong reciprocity? Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 277(1686), 1315–1323.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City: Doubleday.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grossmann, T. (2017). The eyes as windows into other minds: An integrative perspective. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12, 107–121.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haley, K. J., & Fessler, D. M. (2005). Nobody's watching? Subtle cues affect generosity in an anonymous economic game. Evolution and Human Behavior, 26(3), 245–256.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hare, B. (2017). Survival of the friendliest: Homo sapiens evolved via selection for prosociality. Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 155–186.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Keil, M. S. (2009). “I look in your eyes, honey”: Internal face features induce spatial frequency preference for human face processing. PLoS Computational Biology, 5(3), e1000329.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Keller, J., & Pfattheicher, S. (2011). Vigilant self-regulation, cues of being watched and cooperativeness. European Journal of Personality, 25(5), 363–372.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kurzban, R. (2001). The social psychophysics of cooperation: Nonverbal communication in a public goods game. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 25(4), 241–259.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lamba, S., & Mace, R. (2010). People recognise when they are really anonymous in an economic game. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(4), 271–278.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Leimgruber, K. L., Shaw, A., Santos, L. R., & Olson, K. R. (2012). Young children are more generous when others are aware of their actions. PLoS One, 7(10), e48292.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Manesi, Z., & Pollet, T. V. (2017). No support for the watching eyes effect across three "lost letter" field experiments. Letters on Evolutionary Behavioral Science, 8(1), 12–15.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Manesi, Z., Van Lange, P. A., & Pollet, T. V. (2016). Eyes wide open: Only eyes that pay attention promote prosocial behavior. Evolutionary Psychology, 14(2), 1–15.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Matsugasaki, K., Tsukamoto, W., & Ohtsubo, Y. (2015). Two failed replications of the watching eyes effect. Letters on Evolutionary Behavioral Science, 6(2), 17–20.

    Google Scholar 

  • Milinski, M., Semmann, D., & Krambeck, H. (2002). Reputation helps solve the “tragedy of the commons.” Nature, 415(6870), 424–426.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nettle, D., Nott, K., & Bateson, M. (2012). ‘Cycle thieves, we are watching you’: Impact of a simple signage intervention against bicycle theft. PLoS One, 7(12), e51738.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nettle, D., Harper, Z., Kidson, A., Stone, R., Penton-Voak, I. S., & Bateson, M. (2013). The watching eyes effect in the dictator game: it's not how much you give, it's being seen to give something. Evolution and Human Behavior, 34(1), 35–40.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Northover, S. B., Pedersen, W. C., Cohen, A. B., & Andrews, P. W. (2017). Artificial surveillance cues do not increase generosity: Two meta-analyses. Evolution and Human Behavior, 38(1), 144–153.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nosek, B. A., Alter, G., Banks, G. C., Borsboom, D., Bowman, S., Breckler, S., et al. (2015). Promoting an open research culture. Science, 348(6242), 1422–1425.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Oda, R., Niwa, Y., Honma, A., & Hiraishi, K. (2011). An eye-like painting enhances the expectation of a good reputation. Evolution and Human Behavior, 32(3), 166–171.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Panagopoulos, C. (2014a). I've got my eyes on you: Implicit social pressure cues and prosocial behavior. Political Psychology, 35, 23–33.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Panagopoulos, C. (2014b). Watchful eyes: Implicit observability cues and voting. Evolution and Human Behavior, 35, 279–284.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Powell, K. L., Roberts, G., & Nettle, D. (2012). Eye images increase charitable donations: Evidence from an opportunistic field experiment in a supermarket. Ethology, 118(11), 1096–1101.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Saunders, T. J., Taylor, A. H., & Atkinson, Q. D. (2016). No evidence that a range of artificial monitoring cues influence online donations to charity in an MTurk sample. Royal Society Open Science, 3, 150710.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sparks, A., & Barclay, P. (2013). Eye images increase generosity, but not for long: The limited effect of a false cue. Evolution and Human Behavior, 34(5), 317–322.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sparks, A., & Barclay, P. (2015). No effect on condemnation of short or long exposure to eye images. Letters on Evolutionary Behavioral Science, 6(2), 13–16.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • US Census Bureau. (2016). State and county QuickFacts: Charlottesville, Virginia. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/charlottesvillecityvirginiacounty/PST045216.

  • Vaish, A., Kelsey, C. M., Tripathi, A., & Grossmann, T. (2017). Attentiveness to eyes predicts generosity in a reputation-relevant context. Evolution and Human Behavior, 38(6), 729–733.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vogt, S., Efferson, C., Berger, J., & Fehr, E. (2015). Eye spots do not increase altruism in children. Evolution and Human Behavior, 36(3), 224–231.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wedekind, C., & Milinski, M. (2000). Cooperation through image scoring in humans. Science, 288(5467), 850–852.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

We are extremely grateful to the Virginia Discovery Museum in Charlottesville, VA, and in particular to Kaitlin Clear German for all her assistance with data collection. In addition, we would like to thank Janine Oostenbroek and Katie Krol for helpful discussions and comments on the manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, 22904, USA

    Caroline Kelsey, Amrisha Vaish & Tobias Grossmann

Authors
  1. Caroline Kelsey
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Amrisha Vaish
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Tobias Grossmann
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Amrisha Vaish.

Electronic supplementary material

ESM 1

(PDF 207 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Kelsey, C., Vaish, A. & Grossmann, T. Eyes, More Than Other Facial Features, Enhance Real-World Donation Behavior. Hum Nat 29, 390–401 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-018-9327-1

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-018-9327-1

Keywords

Search

Navigation