How do eye cues affect behaviors? Two meta-analyses

Various studies have shown that eye cues trigger a sense of being monitored, leading to behavioral changes, such as increases in prosocial behaviors, decreases in antisocial behaviors, stricter standards of moral judgment, and so on. However, studies have increasingly failed to replicate the watching eyes effect, and previous meta-analyses showed inconsistent results. One potential explanation for the inconsistency of the watching eyes effect is the existence of moderating variables; however, there is a lack of meta-analyses that include moderator analyses. The present study collected 91 articles with 216 effect sizes related to the watching eyes effect, and divided data types into measures of “proportion who did” (i.e., number of participants performing a specified behavior) and “degree of behavior” (i.e., the mean level of a specified behavior) to perform two respective meta-analyses. The results showed that eye cues significantly affected people’s behaviors, with a small but significant effect size (log odds ratio = 0.231, Hedges’ g = 0.117). The cultural type (i.e., Eastern vs. Western) had a marginally significant moderating effect on “degree of behavior”. Publication status, gender ratio, age, dependent variable behavior, stimulus type, eyes presentation time, and experiment type had no significant moderating effects. Finally, the mechanism, influencing factors, and future prospects of the watching eyes effect were discussed.