#359 2012 · Newcastle University (Nettle, Nott, Bateson) · Security / behavioral designunconscious-target
Newcastle cut bike theft 62% with a sign of eyes — then watched it move next door
the problem
Locks, cameras and warning signs weren't stopping campus bike theft
background
Newcastle University's campus bike racks suffered ongoing theft despite conventional deterrents like locks, cameras and warning signs, none of which had produced a measurable drop in incidents. Researchers Daniel Nettle, Kenneth Nott and Melissa Bateson, building on earlier findings that images of eyes make people behave more cooperatively even when no one is actually watching, wanted to test a much cheaper intervention: simply printing a picture of watching eyes.
A believable test needed real theft data, not self-reported behavior, and it needed a way to distinguish actual deterrence — fewer thefts overall — from mere displacement, the same thefts happening somewhere else, a distinction easy to miss if researchers measured theft only at the signed locations themselves.
the move
In May 2011, researchers installed signs bearing a pair of staring eyes and the line 'Cycle thieves: we are watching you' above three bicycle rack locations on campus, then compared recorded thefts in the year before and the year after installation at both the signed racks and the many unsigned racks elsewhere on campus.
the payoff
Bicycle theft fell 62% at the three signed locations, but rose 65% at the unsigned racks across the rest of campus — a near-exact swap, with roughly the same number of fewer thefts at signed racks as additional thefts elsewhere, indicating the signs displaced theft rather than reduced it overall.
what came after
The study is widely cited in behavioral-science and crime-prevention literature both as a demonstration that images of eyes can measurably change real-world behavior at near-zero cost, and, equally importantly, as a textbook caution against declaring victory from a localized intervention without checking for displacement — Newcastle nonetheless expanded the signage across all campus racks, and other operators, including a UK rail line, later trialed the approach.
references
- [1]'Watching eyes' reduce bike theftNewcastle University Press Office, 2013ncl.ac.uk
- [2]'Cycle Thieves, We Are Watching You': Impact of a Simple Signage Intervention against Bicycle TheftPLOS One, 2012journals.plos.org