People really don’t like it when Big Brother is watching. A recent psychological study has revealed that the knowledge of being under surveillance can significantly impact our mental state. This constant awareness of being watched, triggered by surveillance, can have profound implications for public mental health. And we seem to be under surveillance at all times these days with employers more and more observing us at work.
In the study published in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness, researchers from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) investigated the effects of surveillance on a fundamental aspect of human social interaction: our ability to perceive when someone is looking at us.
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The term “Big Brother” originates from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. In the book, a totalitarian state constantly monitors its citizens through omnipresent telescreens and a figure named Big Brother, symbolizing the oppressive surveillance regime. The phrase “Big Brother is watching you” has become synonymous with pervasive surveillance and invasion of privacy.
While there’s no literal Big Brother figure, the concept of constant surveillance is increasingly relevant in our modern world with technologies like CCTV cameras, facial recognition, and data tracking. This raises concerns about the balance between security and individual freedoms.
Lead author, Associate Professor of neuroscience and behavior Kiley Seymour, said previous research has established the effects on conscious behavior when people know they are being watched, but the new study provided the first direct evidence that being watched also has an involuntary response.
“We know CCTV changes our behavior, and that’s the main driver for retailers and others wanting to deploy such technology to prevent unwanted behavior,” Associate Professor Seymour said.
“However, we show it’s not only overt behavior that changes – our brain changes the way it processes information.
“We found direct evidence that being conspicuously monitored via CCTV markedly impacts a hardwired and involuntary function of human sensory perception – the ability to consciously detect a face.
“It’s a mechanism that evolved for us to detect other agents and potential threats in our environment, such as predators and other humans, and it seems to be enhanced when we’re being watched on CCTV.
“Our surveilled participants became hyper aware of face stimuli almost a second faster than the control group. This perceptual enhancement also occurred without participants realizing it.”
Associate Professor Seymour said that given the increasing level of surveillance in society and the ongoing debates around privacy reform, the study’s findings suggested the need for closer examination of the effects of surveillance on mental processes and on public health more broadly.
“We had a surprising yet unsettling finding that despite participants reporting little concern or preoccupation with being monitored, its effects on basic social processing were marked, highly significant and imperceptible to the participants.
“The ability to rapidly detect faces is of critical importance to human social interactions. Information conveyed in faces, such as gaze direction, enables us to construct models of other people’s minds and to use this information to predict behavior.
“We see hyper-sensitivity to eye gaze in mental health conditions like psychosis and social anxiety disorder where individuals hold irrational beliefs or preoccupations with the idea of being watched.
“Whilst this investigation was specifically focused on unconscious social processes, future investigations should explore effects on the limbic system more broadly, which would have more general implications for public mental health and the importance of privacy.”
