Too Long; Didn't Read
It’s a basic principle of human behavior that people are more cooperative when eyes are watching. I mean this literally and figuratively. Literally because you don’t need a human to watch, just eyes. And figuratively because these eyes don’t even need to be real, they can just be an illustrated pair of eyes. I’m not kidding. A famous social-psychological study[1] showed that people are less likely to free-ride a supposed honor system based coffee stand when a sign asking them to leave money in a cup had a pair of eyes drawn on it. Actually, people left nearly three times more money than they did when the picture was just of flowers. As Daniel Kahneman, one of the founding fathers of behavioral economics puts it, people are “endlessly complicated and interesting.”[2]