Watchful eyes: implicit observability cues and voting

Explicit social pressure has been shown to be a powerful motivator of prosocial behavior like voting in elections. In this study, I replicate and extend the findings of a randomized field experiment designed to study the impact of more subtle, implicit social pressure treatments on voting. The results of the original experiment, conducted in the October 2011 municipal elections in Key West, Florida, demonstrated that even subtle, implicit observability cues, like a pair of stylized eyes facing subjects, effectively mobilized citizens to vote, by about as much as explicit surveillance cues. The replication study, conducted in Lexington, KY, during the November 2011 gubernatorial election, corroborates these findings and suggests that eyes effect on average does not likely depend on the gender of eyespots used. Taken together, the two field experiments provide strong support for the notion studies that humans are evolutionarily programmed to respond to certain stimuli and that exposure to images that implicitly signal observability is sufficient to stimulate prosocial behavior.