Đọc Hiểu 11: The Watching Eyes Experiment (Hiệu Ứng Đôi Mắt Quan Sát)

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 63 to 70.

Carrying out experiments is common practice in universities, but teachers from Newcastle University were amused to discover that they had been the subjects of a secret test. Dr Melissa Bateson, a psychologist, wanted to find out if she could change her colleagues' behaviour when it came to paying for their hot drinks. Teachers were expected to put money in a box in the staff room, but nobody controlled how much money each teacher gave. Dr Bateson put a large picture of some flowers on the wall behind the box for a few weeks and then replaced it with one of a picture of a pair of human eyes. At the end of the experiment, Dr Bateson found that teachers paid almost three times more for their drinks when the picture of the eyes was on the wall.

Dr Bateson concluded that we are programmed to respond to eyes, even pictures of eyes, and believed that her posters could help combat crime. A few years later, another experiment at Newcastle University proved this to be true. The experiment involved one of the items most vulnerable to theft that students possess: bicycles. Three posters were made with a warning sentence under the image of a pair of eyes. It said, 'Cycle thieves, we are watching you'. Amazingly, the crime rate for bicycle theft fell by an incredible 62% in the places where the posters were displayed. The police and transport authorities quickly became interested in Dr Bateson's research and they have since used posters of hostile pairs of eyes in their crime prevention campaigns.
(Adapted from Solutions 3rd Edition by Tim Falla and Paul A Davies)