Your litter is watching you

Step aside, Big Brother — there’s a new master of surveillance in town.

British researchers have found that people are less likely to drop litter if the item in question has printed eyes on it. In a paper published in the journal PeerJ, they found that an image of watching eyes reduced the odds of littering by around two thirds.

The study saw researchers from Newcastle University print two leaflets: one featuring a prominent image of stern male eyes and the same leaflet with the eyes obscured. Both leaflets were a part of a campaign to ward off bike thieves and featured the text ‘Cycle thieves — we are watching you’.

In two field experiments, leaflets that either did or did not feature the eyes were attached to parked bicycles. In both experiments, the watching eyes leaflets were substantially less likely to be littered than control leaflets — only 4.7% of people dropped the leaflet with eyes, compared to 15.6% of the control leaflets.

“Our work shows that the presence of eye images can encourage cooperative behaviour, and we think this is because people feel they are being watched,” said Professor Daniel Nettle, who co-led the research.

“As we care what other people think about us, we behave better and more honestly when we feel we are being observed.

“This is reinforced by our results, as we show that we didn’t need to include a message about littering; people know it is antisocial, so it was enough to have an image of the eyes.”

The study is based on the theory of ‘nudge psychology’, which suggests that people may behave better if the best option in a given situation is highlighted for them, but all other options are still left open. The person is not forced into one particular action; rather, they are ‘nudged’ into doing the right thing.

The researchers found that the effect was only present when there were no other people in the immediate vicinity as, when other people are present, you are less likely to behave in an antisocial manner anyway. They would now like to examine the effect when used on fast food wrappers and carry out further investigation into whether less intimidating eye images or the size of the eye picture has an effect.

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