the presence of pictures of eyes reduces antisocial behaviour in humans. it has been suggested that this 'watching-eye' effect is the result of a uniquely human sensitivity to reputation-management cues. However, an alternative explanation is that humans are less likely to carry out risky behaviour in general when they feel like they are being watched. this risk-aversion hypothesis predicts that other animals should also show the watching-eye effect because many animals behave more cautiously when being observed. Dogs are an ideal species to test between these hypotheses because they behave in a risk-averse manner when being watched and attend specifically to eyes when assessing humans' attentional states. Here, we examined if dogs were slower to steal food in the presence of pictures of eyes compared to flowers. Dogs showed no difference in the latency to steal food between the two conditions. This finding shows that dogs are not sensitive to watching-eyes and is not consistent with a risk-aversion hypothesis for the watching-eye effect. Recent work has suggested that humans alter their behaviour when they know they are being observed 1-8. Strikingly, this tendency appears to extend to humans' behaviour when merely being in the presence of eye images. For example, in lab studies where participants play economic games, people appear to donate more generously in the presence of images of eyes 9-11 , even when the images are as minimal as three dots arranged as an inverted triangle 12. This watching-eye effect also appears to generalize to the field. People display a tendency to donate more money to charity or an honesty box when there is an image of eyes on the boxes or solicitation materials compared control images 13-15 , and they appear to be less likely to litter when there are posters with eyes on them in the surrounding environment 16,17. While there have been concerns about the effect not being robust 18,19 , a recent meta-analysis showed that watching-eyes results in a robust reduction in antisocial behaviour 20. Variation in effect size between studies appears to be dependent on the degree to which subjects attend to eyes 21 , and on subjects being in situations where being watched might have real-world consequences (e.g. when subjects are not in environments where there is already a high chance they are being watched 22 , or where they are likely to be anonymous 18,23-25). Crucially, if the watching-eye effect was simply due to human-related images reinforcing social norms or making people feel guilty, any images relating to the human body should produce the same effect and the magnitude of the effect would be the same whether the subject's actions are public or not. However, instead, it has been shown that images of other body parts do not induce the watching-eye effect and the magnitude of the effect is reduced when subjects' actions are anonymous 21. This suggests that the monitoring aspect of eyes is crucial for explaining the watching-eye effect. Whilst the extent to which societies engage in punish...