Why keeping eyes on litter promotes better behaviour (BBC) {about much more than litter}

[eppur_se_muova]

Philip Ball

You are waiting for a bus, but someone has left a newspaper and empty plastic bottles on the bench in the bus shelter. Posted above the bench is a sign showing a person putting litter in the bin. Do you comply with that request and dispose of the items?

About one in three of you will, according to a paper just published by Damien Francey and Ralph Bergmüller, two Swiss “eco-ethologists” at the University of Neuchatel who study human behaviour. At least, one in three Swiss citizens will – decide for yourself if your own community is likely to mimic the good burgers of Geneva, where the experiments were conducted.

But here’s the thing: the public-spirited one in three will, on average, expend more time and effort in clearing the bench if the no-litter sign has an image of eyes on it, than if it has an image of flowers. In other words, the image of eyes seems sufficient to convey a sense that the people are being watched, making them more conscientious about their duties.

Examples of engineering social behaviour through seemingly trivial interventions are well known – perhaps the most famous being how a black fly etched into the urinals at Schiphol Airport in Holland had the effect of, shall we say, improving the accuracy of men’s aim by 80%.

The eyes have it

But there is something more subtle happening in this litter study. The eyes do not affect the proportion of people who clear away litter, but only the time invested by those who do. Francey and Bergmüller say that the ‘good behaviour’ was also more prevalent in people who chose to sit down at the bus stop rather than remaining standing. This was not because they had to dispose of the rubbish to make space on the seat – they could have easily enough just pushed it aside or onto the ground, and besides, they tended to remove more than necessary just to clear a space. It seems that sitting next to litter looks more incriminating, even if you know it is not yours.
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more: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120525-keeping-eyes-on-litter

research paper: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0037397

the famous "broken window" article: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/4465/?single_page=true

[Odin2005]

1. I suspect the eyes study would not work on Aspies like myself.

Because those are exactly the kind of instinctive cues we are blind to.