Alex Bradley
Alex Bradley is first author, with Claire Lawrence and Eamonn Ferguson, of a 2018 meta-analysis in Proceedings of the Royal Society B on whether being observed makes people more prosocial. It found a small positive effect that depends heavily on the conditions.
Who they are
Bradley's affiliation was not checked for this page. The paper is hosted in the University of Nottingham and University of Portsmouth repositories, which suggests the authors' institutions, but this page does not rely on that.
The meta-analysis, "Does observability affect prosociality?", appeared in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences in 2018 (volume 285, issue 1875, article 20180116). It identified 117 papers yielding 134 study-level effects. The authors started from the observation that observing behaviour is central to several models of prosociality, while the empirical results on whether observability increases prosocial behaviour had been mixed.
They found a small but statistically significant positive link between observability and prosociality (r = 0.141, 95 per cent confidence interval 0.106 to 0.175). The effect was stronger when passive observers were present than when participants merely perceived they were being watched. It was also stronger when decisions had real consequences, in laboratory settings than in field or online studies, with repeated measures than with single games, and in social dilemmas than in bargaining games.
The paper is about observability in general. The page of the paper this library read does not mention eye cues, and this page does not claim that it tested them.
Key papers
Bradley, A., Lawrence, C., & Ferguson, E. (2018). Does observability affect prosociality? Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 285(1875), 20180116. doi:10.1098/rspb.2018.0116
Key ideas
The relevant finding for The Watching Eyes Effect is the gap between a real observer and a perceived one. If a person present moves behaviour more than the impression of one, a picture of eyes is the weaker version of a cue that already has a modest effect.
This library's earlier notes recorded the 2018 result as a small positive effect of observation cues, set against the 2017 meta-analyses of Northover and colleagues. The paper's abstract speaks of observability, and the safer reading is that it supports real observers and leaves the eye-picture question to the studies that tested it.
Sources
- Bradley, Lawrence and Ferguson (2018), abstract read on the University of Portsmouth research portal.