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from Frontiers
People often become more altruistic when they think or feel that someone is watching them. Known as the “watching-eyes effect”, this is argued to be caused by the motivation to gain and maintain a positive social reputation as an altruistic individual (the “reputation seeking” mechanism). However, an alternative mechanism underlying the watching-eyes effect could be that people suppress their impulsive tendency to pursue benefit rather than increase their altruism, and this may lead to apparent increases in altruistic tendencies. This “suppressing impulsivity” mechanism is considered intrapersonal rather than socially mediated which is associated with “reputation seeking.” We examined whether the suppressing impulsivity mechanism would be associated with the watching-eyes effect by measuring participants’ impulsivity in the presence of watching-eyes stimuli. In a controlled experiment, we presented life-size pictures of human faces with a direct gaze on a monitor in front of participants taking part in a time-discounting task. Two types of faces, “in-group” (faces of participants’ classmates) and “out-group” (unfamiliar faces) were presented to examine the effect of social attribution. We used a flower picture as a control stimulus. In the time-discounting task, participants chose one of two options: a small amount of money that they could get immediately or a larger amount of money that they could get after a given time interval. The results showed no significant differen...
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