Being watched or being special: how I learned to stop worrying and love being monitored, surveilled, and assessed

This paper explores the relationship between display of feedback (public vs. private) and the basis for evaluation (present vs. absent) of that feedback. Using a controlled, laboratory setting, we employ a fundamentally social, interpersonal context (speed-dating). Two participants (one male and one female) receive real-time performance feedback about either only themselves (private) or about both participants (public). We measure participant perceptions of monitoring, conformity, and self-consciousness about themselves and their dating partner. We also assess perceptions of system invasiveness, system competence, and system support. Results reveal a consistent pattern of significant interaction between feedback display and basis for evaluation conditions. In each of these interactions, public feedback with an added, trivial, basis for evaluation creates significantly lower perception of monitoring, conformity, self-consciousness, and system invasiveness, than the other three conditions. Additionally there is a main effect for basis for evaluation with respect to system competence and supportiveness. In each case, the presence of a basis produces more positive assessments than its absence. The experiment shows that reactions to being monitored and evaluated do not differ strictly along the dimension of public vs. private; basis for evaluation of feedback functions as a mediator and thus co-determines participant attitudinal responses. We discuss the implications of this at several levels, and present a broader cultural explanation in terms of the theory of rationalization. We also discuss the issues around and functionality of linking laboratory settings to larger cultural contexts in this and related fields of inquiry.