Human behaviour can be influenced by an observer.
A real life situation is if an observer were to come into a classroom full of students and they were aware of the observer, it would cause demand characteristics, where a person changes their behaviour in order to perform what they think is expected. They wouldn’t act as they usually would, for example, if the principle were to watch them, the students may talk less with each other and act more focused than they may usually be. Demand characteristics can happen in many psychological experiments, for example, Brown and Kulik’s experiment in 1977 on flashbulb memories. Brown & Kulik gave 80 participants questionnaires which had a series of nine events, like the assassination of President Kennedy, and they were asked to recall the circumstances when they first heard about the event. Where the participants said they remembered the event, they were asked to write a detailed account about what happened that day and rate it on a scale of personal importance. The way the question is framed can induce demand characteristics, as the question makes the participant assume that they should know about the event. Moreover, this means that they might lie about remembering the event and the researchers cannot verify if the stories are true, making the experiment less reliable. When people are aware they are being observed, the task or observer creates an implicit demand for the people to perform as expected.