Crafting messages to fight dishonesty: A field investigation of the effects of social norms and watching eye cues on fare evasion

The impact of watching eyes cues and descriptive social norm messages on fare evasion was studied in two experiments that were conducted in two railway stations in France. In Study 1, a natural field experiment, passengers were exposed for a two-week period to either a control eye-cues poster or to an experimental eye-cues with a social norm messaging campaign. In Study 2, an artefactual experiment in the field, participants in the experimental train station were asked to participate in a lying task before and after they were exposed to the messaging campaign. The results from both studies suggest that although watching eye cues alone are not effective in a crowded train station, exposing passengers to watching eye cues together with a descriptive social norm messaging campaign reduced the fare evasion rates observed by standard inspection operations, and eliminated lying behavior measured by the die-under-cup paradigm. These results strengthen the external validity of laboratory experiments that have documented small scale cheating behavior and highlight the potential benefits of internal enforcement techniques to fight dishonesty in the field. In addition, they stress the advantage of combining visibility cues and social norms when orienting people toward more moral behavior.