Effects of Watching Eyes and Norm Cues on Charitable Giving in a Surreptitious Behavioral Experiment:

Evolutionary Psychology

Moe Fathi¹ 

关键词: charitable giving;    prosocial behavior;    watching eyes;    norms;    norm psychology;   

DOI  :  10.1177/147470491401200502

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Sage Journals

【 摘 要 】

A series of experimental studies by multiple groups of researchers have found that displaying images of watching eyes causes people to behave more prosocially. It is not yet clear whether watching eyes increase prosocial motivation per se, or whether they simply make people's behavior more normative. Here, we report results from a surreptitious behavioral experiment examining the impacts of watching eye images and cues to local norms on charitable donations in a controlled setting. Eye images significantly increased average donations. Eye images did not make people conform more closely to the apparent norm overall. Instead, there were different patterns according to the apparent norm. For an apparent norm of small donations, eye images made many participants more generous than the norm. For an apparent norm of large donations, there was an excess of participants giving zero in the no-eyes treatment, which was abolished in the eyes treatment. Our results can be explained by a combination of watching eyes increasing prosocial motivation and reluctance to leave a donation visibly less generous than the norm.

【 授权许可】

CC BY-NC