From the Stare to the Street Camera: Social Inhibition, Monitoring Pressure, and Ambient Surveillance

People often perform a familiar task worse when someone watches them. This narrative review identifies that effect as social inhibition, the impairment side of the audience effect, and asks which part of the mechanism survives when the observer is a camera rather than a person. Laboratory research shows a small, directional effect: observation speeds simple, dominant responses and slows or degrades complex, novel, or precision-demanding ones. The best-supported accounts are evaluation apprehension, attentional capture by direct gaze, and monitoring pressure. None requires that the performer be concealing anything. The review separates this effect from the Hawthorne effect and from claims of a psychic sensitivity to unseen gaze. Automated license-plate readers do not inherit the gaze effect. Flock Safety’s network, reported in 2026 at more than 120,000 cameras, about 7,000 police-department contracts, and about 20 billion plate scans a month, records vehicles rather than skilled performances. What can transfer is latent evaluation: if people believe a trip can later be reviewed, identifiability may narrow the conduct they treat as unremarkable in public. The paper states that population claim as a set of falsifiable predictions, not as a finding. No new data are reported.