Jul 052006
One cliche of popular conventional ethics is, “Integrity is doing the right thing even if no one is watching”. (For the record, this is quite different from the Objectivist concept of the virtue of integrity, which is more akin to “the principle of being principled”.)
But in an interesting experiment, scientists have found that people are nearly 3 times more likely to be honest about paying into the “honor system” office coffee fund if there is a large photograph of a pair of eyes mounted just above the collection box, apparently looking at the payor. Presumably this taps into some subconscious element of human psychology.
