ArticleFrontiers in psychology2023
Watching eyes effect: the impact of imagined eyes on prosocial behavior and satisfactions in the dictator game.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 3 citations in OpenAlex.
- Watching Eyes at Home: A Proof-of-Concept Study.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Imagined eye cue increased altruistic behavior toward charity instead of stranger.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Jealousy as Predicted by Allocation and Reception of Resources in an Economic Game.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The concept of the watching eyes effect suggests that the presence of eye or eye-like cues can influence individual altruistic behavior. However, few studies have investigated the effects of imagined eyes on altruistic behaviors and the psychological measures of dictators and recipients in the dictator game. This study used a 2 (Presentation Mode: Imagined/Visual) 2 (Cue Type: Eye/Flower) between-subject design and measured the effects of recipients' psychological variables and the communication texts between the dictator and the recipient. The results showed that there was a significant interaction between Presentation Mode and Cue Type. In the imagined condition, the dictator exhibited more altruistic behavior than in the visual condition. However, there was no significant difference in altruistic behavior between the Imagined Eye and Imagined Flower conditions. In addition, the study found that the Cue Type had a significant main effect on the recipients' satisfaction with the allocation outcome. Notably, in the Visual Flower condition, the dictator used more egoistic norm words when communicating with the recipient than other conditions. This study provides novel evidence on the effect of imagined social cues on individual behavior in the dictator game, and to some extent validates the robustness of the watching eyes effect under manipulation of higher-level verbal cognitive processes. At the same time, the study is the first to explore the impacts on recipients' psychological variables and the communication texts. These efforts offer new insights into the psychological and cognitive mechanisms underlying the watching eyes effect.
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