How would your behavior change if you thought someone was watching you? Two recent studies suggest that you might start acting more honestly. A 2006 study at a university faculty lounge offered coffee and tea to professors that for years had used an unsupervised honor system. The rules were clear: serve yourself and then put the money you owed into a box. For ten weeks, though, the experimenters put a hard-to-miss poster near the box. One version of the poster featured pretty flowers; the other version had a pair of eyes glaring out at the viewer. The image alternated between flowers and eyes each week. People paid almost three times more on "eyes" weeks than on "flowers" weeks.

A 2012 study found the same results—only this time watching eyes changed the behavior of potential bicycle thieves. Researchers put signs with a large pair of menacing eyes and the message "Cycle thieves: we are watching you" by the bike racks at Newcastle University in England. They then monitored bike thefts for two years and found a 62 percent drop in thefts at locations with the signs.

But there was an interesting twist to this experiment. While theft rates went down 62 percent in the "we are watching you" racks, in other places in the university it shot up by 65 percent—an almost perfect offset. In other words, the thieves kept stealing bikes; they just went down the street to get away from those eyeballs of judgment and accountability.