On holiday weekends along the Hume Highway, large mobile billboards appear showing a policeman looking down the barrel of a speed camera. The police believe these signs deter speeding drivers, and that they are effective, far beyond the simple reminder they provide that the traffic squad is on patrol.
A recent study by psychologists at the University of Newcastle in Britain might explain why. The researchers used a departmental tea room where an ‘honesty box’ system had been in operation for years. They posted a price list by the honesty box, and changed it each week. While the prices were always the same, the photograph at the top of the list was changed. Some weeks, the picture was of flowers; other weeks, pairs of eyes stared straight out at the viewer, Big Brother-style.
When the list was topped by eyes, the researchers found that people put nearly three times as much money in the honesty box for the amount of tea and coffee they consumed. The eyes dramatically affected behaviour, despite the fact that it was quite clearly a photo. The research team speculated this might be a hangover of our evolution as a highly social species dependent on vision—that humans have evolved to respond in a reflex manner to the feeling of being observed.
Another recently published study, this time from the US, shows that over confidence makes people more likely to wage war, but less likely to win. In this case, the researchers suggested that such optimism may have been an advantage bluffing opponents in our evolutionary past, but that it doesn’t play well in modern international relations. The link with the Bush administration’s predicament in Iraq was not lost on local commentators.
These stories illustrate why a sophisticated understanding of our evolutionary history is important—it can actually say something about present behaviour. But if it is to do this, public understanding of evolution is itself in need of a bit of evolution. At present it seems to have been caught in a time warp, and is sadly out of date.
Two misconceptions come immediately to mind. Those who have little understanding of the modern view of the way natural selection operates still talk in terms of something being ‘for the good of the species’, as if species had a collective will. But though it is true that species evolve, natural selection almost invariably works at the level