Attentiveness to eyes predicts generosity in a reputation-relevant context

Eyes play a vital role in human social interactions. In fact, some prior work indicates that simply the presence of eyes or eye-like stimuli increases people's prosocial behavior, arguably because the eyes serve as cues of being watched and thus elicit reputational concerns. The current study was designed to address two questions in this regard. First, we examined how salient the eyes are among the human features. Second, we asked whether individual differences in attentiveness to eyes (but not other human features such as ears or hands) are predictive of reputation-enhancing behavior. Using an eye-tracking paradigm, we found that participants looked longest to eyes compared to other human features. Critically, greater attentiveness to eyes correlated with greater generosity on a donation task, but only in a reputation-relevant context (i.e., when donations were public but not when they were anonymous). Attentiveness to other human features did not predict donation behavior. Eyes are thus an especially salient human feature, and attentiveness to eyes may signal individuals' concerns about their reputations.     

The watching eyes effect in the Dictator Game: it's not how much you give,it's being seen to give something

In a classic study, Haley and Fessler showed that displaying subtle eye-like stimuli caused participants to behave more generously in the Dictator Game. Since their paper was published, there have been both successful replications and null results reported in the literature. However, it is important to clarify that two logically separable effects were found in their original experiment: watching eyes made the mean donation higher, and also increased the probability of donating something rather than nothing. Here, we report a replication study with 118 participants, in which we found that watching eyes significantly increased the probability of donating something, but did not increase the mean donation. Results did not depend on the sex of the participants or the sex of the eyes. We also present a meta-analysis of the seven studies of watching eye effects in the Dictator Game published to date. Combined, these studies total 887 participants, and show that although watching eyes do not reliably increase mean donations, they do reliably increase the probability of donating something rather than nothing (combined odds ratio 1.39). We conclude that the watching eyes effect in the Dictator Game is robust, but its interpretation may require refinement. Rather than making people directionally more generous, it may be that watching eyes reduce variation in social behavior.     

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

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.     

Eye images increase generosity,but not for long: the limited effect of a false cue

People are more cooperative when explicitly observed, and simply exposing people to images of eyes or faces has been shown to increase cooperation of various types and in various contexts, albeit with notable, if controversial, exceptions. This ‘eyes effect’ is important both for its potential real-world applications and for its implications regarding the role of reputation in the evolution and maintenance of human cooperation. Based on the general principle that organisms eventually cease responding to uninformative stimuli, we predicted that the eyes effect would be eliminated by prolonged exposure. A novel experiment confirmed that participants exposed briefly to an eye-like image gave more money in an economic game than those in a longer exposure condition and those in a control condition. There was no generosity difference between the long exposure and control conditions. Furthermore, a meta-analysis of 25 eyes effects experiments confirmed that the effect emerges reliably after short exposures to eye images, but not after long exposures. An understanding of the limits of false cues on behaviour helps resolve empirical discrepancies regarding the eyes effect and exonerates the importance of reputation even in anonymous, one-shot interactions.     

The Effect of Group Attachment and Social Position on Prosocial Behavior. Evidence from Lab-in-the-Field Experiments

Social life is regulated by norms of fairness that constrain selfish behavior. While a substantial body of scholarship on prosocial behavior has provided evidence of such norms, large inter- and intra-personal variation in prosocial behavior still needs to be explained. The article identifies two social-structural dimensions along which people''s generosity varies systematically: group attachment and social position. We conducted lab-in-the-field experiments involving 2,597 members of producer organizations in rural Uganda. Using different variants of the dictator game, we demonstrate that group attachment positively affects prosocial behavior, and that this effect is not simply the by-product of the degree of proximity between individuals. Second, we show that occupying a formal position in an organization or community leads to greater generosity toward in-group members. Taken together, our findings show that prosocial behavior is not an invariant social trait; rather, it varies according to individuals'' relative position in the social structure.     

Social Norms of Cooperation in Small-Scale Societies

Indirect reciprocity, besides providing a convenient framework to address the evolution of moral systems, offers a simple and plausible explanation for the prevalence of cooperation among unrelated individuals. By helping someone, an individual may increase her/his reputation, which may change the pre-disposition of others to help her/him in the future. This, however, depends on what is reckoned as a good or a bad action, i.e., on the adopted social norm responsible for raising or damaging a reputation. In particular, it remains an open question which social norms are able to foster cooperation in small-scale societies, while enduring the wide plethora of stochastic affects inherent to finite populations. Here we address this problem by studying the stochastic dynamics of cooperation under distinct social norms, showing that the leading norms capable of promoting cooperation depend on the community size. However, only a single norm systematically leads to the highest cooperative standards in small communities. That simple norm dictates that only whoever cooperates with good individuals, and defects against bad ones, deserves a good reputation, a pattern that proves robust to errors, mutations and variations in the intensity of selection.     

Oxytocin infusion increases charitable donations regardless of monetary resources

This study examined if the prosocial effects of oxytocin (OT) extend from individuals to a generalized other who is in need. Participants played a series of economic games to earn money and were presented with an opportunity to donate a portion of their earnings to charity. OT did not significantly increase the decision to donate, but among the 36% of participants who did donate, people infused with OT were found to donate 48% more to charity than those given a placebo. The amount of money earned in the experiment had no effect on whether or not a donation was made or the size of a donation. This is the first study showing that OT increases generosity in unilateral exchanges directed toward philanthropic social institutions, as opposed to immediate benefits directed at individuals or groups.     

Rewarding the good and punishing the bad: The role of karma and afterlife beliefs in shaping moral norms

Moralizing religions encourage people to anticipate supernatural punishments for violating moral norms, even in anonymous interactions. This is thought to be one way large-scale societies have solved cooperative dilemmas. Previous research has overwhelmingly focused on the effects of moralizing gods, and has yet to thoroughly examine other religious moralizing systems, such as karma, to which more than a billion people subscribe worldwide. In two pre-registered studies conducted with Chinese Singaporeans, we compared the moralizing effects of karma and afterlife beliefs of Buddhists, Taoists, Christians, and the non-religious. In Study 1 (N = 582), we found that Buddhists and Taoists (karmic religions) judge individual actions as having greater consequences in this life and the next, compared to Christians. Pointing to the specific role of karma beliefs in these judgements, these effects were replicated in comparisons of participants from the non-karmic religions/groups (Christian and non-religious) who did or did not endorse karma belief. Study 2 (N = 830) exploited religious syncretism in this population by reminding participants about either moral afterlife beliefs (reincarnation or heaven/hell), ancestor veneration beliefs, or neither, before assessing norms of generosity in a series of hypothetical dictator games. When reminded of their ancestor veneration beliefs, Buddhists and Taoists (but not Christians) endorsed parochial prosocial norms, expressing willingness to give more to their family and religious group than did those in the control condition. Moral afterlife beliefs increased generosity to strangers for all groups. Taken together, these results provide evidence that different religious beliefs can foster and maintain different prosocial and cooperative norms.     

Global analyses of evolutionary dynamics and exhaustive search for social norms that maintain cooperation by reputation

Reputation formation is a key to understanding indirect reciprocity. In particular, the way to assign reputation to each individual, namely a norm that describes who is good and who is bad, greatly affects the possibility of sustained cooperation in the population. Previously, we have exhaustively studied reputation dynamics that are able to maintain a high level of cooperation at the ESS. However, this analysis examined the stability of monomorphic population and did not investigate polymorphic population where several strategies coexist. Here, we study the evolutionary dynamics of multiple behavioral strategies by replicator dynamics. We exhaustively study all 16 possible norms under which the reputation of a player in the next round is determined by the action of the self and the reputation of the opponent. For each norm, we explore evolutionary dynamics of three strategies: unconditional cooperators, unconditional defectors, and conditional cooperators. We find that only three norms, simple-standing, Kandori, and shunning, can make conditional cooperation evolutionarily stable, hence, realize sustained cooperation. The other 13 norms, including scoring, ultimately lead to the invasion by defectors. Also, we study the model in which private reputation errors exist to a small extent. In this case, we find the stable coexistence of unconditional and conditional cooperators under the three norms.     

Young Children Are More Generous When Others Are Aware of Their Actions

Adults frequently employ reputation-enhancing strategies when engaging in prosocial acts, behaving more generously when their actions are likely to be witnessed by others and even more so when the extent of their generosity is made public. This study examined the developmental origins of sensitivity to cues associated with reputationally motivated prosociality by presenting five-year-olds with the option to provide one or four stickers to a familiar peer recipient at no cost to themselves. We systematically manipulated the recipient’s knowledge of the actor’s choices in two different ways: (1) occluding the recipient’s view of both the actor and the allocation options and (2) presenting allocations in opaque containers whose contents were visible only to the actor. Children were consistently generous only when the recipient was fully aware of the donation options; in all cases in which the recipient was not aware of the donation options, children were strikingly ungenerous. These results demonstrate that five-year-olds exhibit “strategic prosociality,” behaving differentially generous as a function of the amount of information available to the recipient about their actions. These findings suggest that long before they develop a rich understanding of the social significance of reputation or are conscious of complex strategic reasoning, children behave more generously when the details of their prosocial actions are available to others.     

Give What You Get: Capuchin Monkeys (Cebus apella) and 4-Year-Old Children Pay Forward Positive and Negative Outcomes to Conspecifics

The breadth of human generosity is unparalleled in the natural world, and much research has explored the mechanisms underlying and motivating human prosocial behavior. Recent work has focused on the spread of prosocial behavior within groups through paying-it-forward, a case of human prosociality in which a recipient of generosity pays a good deed forward to a third individual, rather than back to the original source of generosity. While research shows that human adults do indeed pay forward generosity, little is known about the origins of this behavior. Here, we show that both capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) and 4-year-old children pay forward positive and negative outcomes in an identical testing paradigm. These results suggest that a cognitively simple mechanism present early in phylogeny and ontogeny leads to paying forward positive, as well as negative, outcomes.     

Choosy moral punishers

The punishment of social misconduct is a powerful mechanism for stabilizing high levels of cooperation among unrelated individuals. It is regularly assumed that humans have a universal disposition to punish social norm violators, which is sometimes labelled "universal structure of human morality" or "pure aversion to social betrayal". Here we present evidence that, contrary to this hypothesis, the propensity to punish a moral norm violator varies among participants with different career trajectories. In anonymous real-life conditions, future teachers punished a talented but immoral young violinist: they voted against her in an important music competition when they had been informed of her previous blatant misconduct toward fellow violin students. In contrast, future police officers and high school students did not punish. This variation among socio-professional categories indicates that the punishment of norm violators is not entirely explained by an aversion to social betrayal. We suggest that context specificity plays an important role in normative behaviour; people seem inclined to enforce social norms only in situations that are familiar, relevant for their social category, and possibly strategically advantageous.     

Public charity offer as a proximate factor of evolved reputation-building strategy: an experimental analysis of a real-life situation

Although theoretical considerations suggest that a considerable portion of human altruism is driven by concerns about reputation, few experimental studies have examined the psychological correlates of individual decisions in real-life situations. Here we demonstrate that more subjects were willing to give assistance to unfamiliar people in need if they could make their charity offers in the presence of their group mates than in a situation where the offers remained concealed from others. In return, those who were willing to participate in a particular charitable activity received significantly higher scores than others on scales measuring sympathy and trustworthiness. Finally, a multiple regression analysis revealed that while several personality and behavior traits (cooperative ability, Machiavellianism, sensitivity to norms, and sex) play a role in the development of prosocial behavior, the possibility of gaining reputation within the group remains a measurable determinant of charitable behavior.     

Eye Images Increase Charitable Donations: Evidence From an Opportunistic Field Experiment in a Supermarket

A number of studies have shown that the presence of simple images of eyes in the environment increases prosocial behaviour in humans. However, questions remain about the robustness of the effect, its explanation and the factors promoting it. In particular, it is not yet clear whether this effect is restricted to contexts where there is a normative requirement to behave prosocially and thus where punishment is a likely consequence of failing to do so. In an 11‐wk field experiment in a supermarket, we displayed either eye images or control images on charity collection buckets. There was no normative requirement to donate in this setting, and most people did not do so. However, the presence of eye images increased donations by 48% relative to control images. The effect of eye images was significantly stronger at times when the supermarket was quiet rather than busy. Results are consistent with models of the evolution of prosociality through reputation‐based partner choice and have potential practical benefits for those involved in charitable fundraising.     

A positive effect of flowers rather than eye images in a large-scale, cross-cultural dictator game

People often consider how their behaviour will be viewed by others, and may cooperate to avoid gaining a bad reputation. Sensitivity to reputation may be elicited by subtle social cues of being watched: previous studies have shown that people behave more cooperatively when they see images of eyes rather than control images. Here, we tested whether eye images enhance cooperation in a dictator game, using the online labour market Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). In contrast to our predictions and the results of most previous studies, dictators gave away more money when they saw images of flowers rather than eye images. Donations in response to eye images were not significantly different to donations under control treatments. Dictator donations varied significantly across cultures but there was no systematic variation in responses to different image types across cultures. Unlike most previous studies, players interacting via AMT may feel truly anonymous when making decisions and, as such, may not respond to subtle social cues of being watched. Nevertheless, dictators gave away similar amounts as in previous studies, so anonymity did not erase helpfulness. We suggest that eye images might only promote cooperative behaviour in relatively public settings and that people may ignore these cues when they know their behaviour is truly anonymous.     

Indirect reciprocity under incomplete observation

Indirect reciprocity, in which individuals help others with a good reputation but not those with a bad reputation, is a mechanism for cooperation in social dilemma situations when individuals do not repeatedly interact with the same partners. In a relatively large society where indirect reciprocity is relevant, individuals may not know each other's reputation even indirectly. Previous studies investigated the situations where individuals playing the game have to determine the action possibly without knowing others' reputations. Nevertheless, the possibility that observers of the game, who generate the reputation of the interacting players, assign reputations without complete information about them has been neglected. Because an individual acts as an interacting player and as an observer on different occasions if indirect reciprocity is endogenously sustained in a society, the incompleteness of information may affect either role. We examine the game of indirect reciprocity when the reputations of players are not necessarily known to observers and to interacting players. We find that the trustful discriminator, which cooperates with good and unknown players and defects against bad players, realizes cooperative societies under seven social norms. Among the seven social norms, three of the four suspicious norms under which cooperation (defection) to unknown players leads to a good (bad) reputation enable cooperation down to a relatively small observation probability. In contrast, the three trustful norms under which both cooperation and defection to unknown players lead to a good reputation are relatively efficient.     

The Importance of Demonstratively Restoring Order

Contrary to what is often assumed, order is not the strongest context for encouraging normative behavior. The strongest context effect on normative behavior comes from cues that clearly convey other people’s respect for norms. Ironically, this show of respect necessitates some contrasting disrespect that is being restored. Using civic virtues (such as helping behavior) as a prototype of normative behavior, the three field experiments described in this paper reveal the impact of normative cues on civic virtues. Results show that the strongest effect on making people follow prosocial norms in public places emanates from seeing order being restored, rather than just order being present. The robust and surprisingly large effects show that observing other people’s respect for one particular norm (as evidenced in their restoring physical order) makes it more likely that the onlooker follows other norms as well. This implies that prosocial behavior has the highest chance of spreading when people observe order being restored. There are clear policy implications: create low cost “normative respect cues” wherever it is desirable to increase conformity to norms.     

Salient eyes deter conspecific nest intruders in wild jackdaws (Corvus monedula)

Animals often respond fearfully when encountering eyes or eye-like shapes. Although gaze aversion has been documented in mammals when avoiding group-member conflict, the importance of eye coloration during interactions between conspecifics has yet to be examined in non-primate species. Jackdaws (Corvus monedula) have near-white irides, which are conspicuous against their dark feathers and visible when seen from outside the cavities where they nest. Because jackdaws compete for nest sites, their conspicuous eyes may act as a warning signal to indicate that a nest is occupied and deter intrusions by conspecifics. We tested whether jackdaws’ pale irides serve as a deterrent to prospecting conspecifics by comparing prospectors’ behaviour towards nest-boxes displaying images with bright eyes (BEs) only, a jackdaw face with natural BEs, or a jackdaw face with dark eyes. The jackdaw face with BEs was most effective in deterring birds from making contact with nest-boxes, whereas both BE conditions reduced the amount of time jackdaws spent in proximity to the image. We suggest BEs in jackdaws may function to prevent conspecific competitors from approaching occupied nest sites.