CCTV cameras are everywhere — and they’re changing how your brain responds

I am pretty skeptical that this is a generalizable or reproducible result. The study had people do a pretty arcane facial-recognition task and found that

Specifically, we reveal that when people are conspicuously monitored via CCTV, they become aware of face stimuli much faster than when they are not monitored. This perceptual enhancement is almost a second faster in magnitude and seems to occur outside the individual’s awareness.

Not to throw cold water on this, but when you get a result like this, I think it's much more appropriate to question the study design than to crow about the magnitude of the effect. Does it seem logical that being observed by CCTV would improve your speed at recognizing faces by almost a second? Not everything the body does is logical, but "does this make sense" is a good first test.

Since the experimental design was rather provocative -

To convince participants in the watched group that they were being surveilled during the task, cameras were noticeably set up within the testing booth prior to testing (Fig. 1a), and participants were shown a live feed of the testing booth from the adjacent room. We chose to make this manipulation conspicuous rather than subtle as it has been shown that the feeling of being watched is already prevalent in healthy participants.

It seems far more likely that the experimental group simply tried harder.

(I also question whether this is generalizable to the CCTV in grocery stores.)