The psychological effect of being watched by others has been proven a powerful tool in modulating social behaviors (e.g., charitable giving) and altering cognitive performance (e.g., visual search). Here we tested whether such awareness would affect one of the core elements of human cognition: emotional processing and impulse control. Using an emotion stop-signal paradigm, we found that viewing...

The COVID-19 pandemic has created new opportunities and tensions related to workplace surveillance. Monitoring workers via digital tools analyze everything from keystrokes email social media the websites they visit is increasingly common, shift remote work in early days of led many employers consider ways monitor their employees while working home. In this paper, we how affected office workers’...

The present study is a first attempt to experimentally test the impact of two specific social factors, namely social conformity pressure and a sense of being watched, on participants' judgments of the artistic quality of aesthetic objects. We manipulated conformity pressure with a test form in which a photograph of each stimulus was presented together with unanimously low (downward pressure) or...

Performing more poorly given one's skill level ("choking") is likely in situations that offer an incentive if a certain outcome is achieved (outcome pressure) or when one is being watched by others-especially when one's performance is being evaluated (monitoring pressure). According to the choking literature, outcome pressure is associated with reduced executive control of attention, whereas mo...

—Recognizing that privacy rights are complicit in the very forms of economic monitoring and data gathering they ostensibly oppose, this essay offers a critique of corporate surveillance as a technique for exploiting the work of being watched. Consumers who submit to comprehensive surveillance in response to offers of convenience and participation perform valuable work for corporations and marke...

Toxic gaming and griefing in online games are part of the everyday interaction of players around the world. Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games are notorious for their players’ toxic behavior. League of Legends (LoL), one of the most popular MOBA games, uses the Tribunal system as a strategy to restrict and punish toxic behaviors. The Tribunal system is a neutral body of surveillance t...

We examined the effect of an image of a pair of eyes on contributions to an honesty box used to collect money for drinks in a university coffee room. People paid nearly three times as much for their drinks when eyes were displayed rather than a control image. This finding provides the first evidence from a naturalistic setting of the importance of cues of being watched, and hence reputational c...