The Effect Of Eye Gaze Cues On Corrupt Tendency

The eye is an important sensory organ of the human body,not only helping us to capture a large amount of visual information,observe the complex external environment,but also play a special role in human behavior with its important perceptual function and cultural metaphor,which is specifically manifested in the field of psychology as the "watching eyes effect",that is,the phenomenon that the presence of eyes or eye-like visual cues in a given environment changes an individual’s behavior.The main mechanisms of the watching eyes effect include reputation mechanism,rule mechanism,and self-referential processing and mentalization mechanism.Currently,most applied studies on the watching eyes effect focus on the influence of eye gaze cues on prosocial behavior,altruistic behavior or social morality behavior.At the same time,corruption,as a specific form of social interaction,belongs to the research scope of social psychology,so it is possible to find psychological tools that may avoid such negative events or weaken their impact from a psychological point of view.For this purpose,this study explored the influence of eye gaze cues on individual corruption tendency and its moderating factors through four parts.In the pre-experimental stage,the focus was on the psychological process before the effect of the eye gaze cues,and the subjective report of the subjects proved that the eye gaze cues could steadily trigger the "sense of being seen" of the subjects.Experiment 1 investigated the influence of different presentation modes of eye gaze cues on corruption tendency.It was found that the main effect of presentation modes was not significant,both concomitant and non-concomitant eye gaze cues could significantly reduce the corruption tendency of the subjects,indicating the robustness of the watching eyes effect.Experiment 2 investigated whether the type of interaction relationship played a moderating role in the process of eye gaze cues reducing the tendency of corruption.It was found that the interaction between the type of cue and the type of interaction relationship is significant,and the close interaction relationship will inhibit the supervision of eye gaze cues,thus weakening its influence on corruption tendency.This indicates that the relationship bond in the Chinese cultural background poses an important challenge to the effective realization of the watching eyes effect in the field of anti-corruption.Experiment 3 investigated whether the state public self-awareness played a moderating role in the process of eye gaze cues reducing the tendency of corruption.It was found that the main effect of state public self-awareness was significant,and priming state public self-awareness could independently reduce the corruption tendency of the subjects,but the interaction between the type of cue and state public self-awareness was not significant,and priming state public self-awareness could not enlarge the supervision of the eye gaze cues,and thus could not enhance its influence on the corruption tendency.Considering that the two influence directions are the same,it is speculated that there may be a "floor effect",that is,the inhibitory effect of eye gaze cues on corruption tendency is close to the bottom line and cannot be further amplified by state public self-awareness.