How does observing affect us?

Q: How does our online behaviour change if we think someone is watching? A: Associate Professor Quentin Atkinson, of the school of psychology at the University of Auckland, says: Humans care deeply about their reputations.

If we know our choices will be made public, we act more prosocially. Recent work has shown that simple but evolutionarily significant artificial monitoring cues, such as an image of a pair of eyes, can promote co-operation.

While an image alone cannot monitor behaviour, the evolutionary legacy hypothesis says that humans possess an evolved proximate mechanism that causes us to react to monitoring cues as if our reputations are at stake.

We examined whether a range of artificial monitoring cues can affect online charity donations across 1535 culturally diverse participants.

We found no evidence that participants in our online survey donated more to charity or were more likely to give to charity in the presence of a diverse range of artificial monitoring stimuli.

Priming faces or eyes did not affect donation behaviour, regardless of the real or abstract nature of the images used, the number of eyes or faces, or the emotion expressed.

None of the monitoring cues produced a significant effect on donation behaviour.

We did, however, find that sex, broad cultural background, age and past donation frequency influenced the amount donated.

Females were found to donate more than males, replicating previous researchers’ findings.

Consistent with previous work, we found large differences in prosocial giving across widely recognised cultural divisions – in particular, English-speaking versus South Asian cultures.

Thus, though we did not detect a monitoring effect, we did replicate a number of other recent findings regarding the predictors of human pro-sociality.

The findings suggest it’s not so easy to increase good behaviour using online cues such as images, and that’s an interesting finding given the level of interest in looking at how we behave online and what might influence online behaviour.

This study suggests that traditional factors, such as age, culture or ethnicity, and in particular a past history of giving to charity, have a greater effect on how altruistic we choose to be.