I feel that may be a bit creepy, though perhaps that is the point. Still, a slightly-off-center gaze would be preferable. Seems relatively easy to conduct this experiment, unless there's a flaw in my reasoning of what the control would be.
What kind of design would you suggest? Keep in mind my resources are pretty limited. I was thinking maybe of doing flyers with different throwaway email addresses, and seeing how many people responded to flyers with different pictures (people looking away or towards, famous people who are said to possess a specific virtue and random people, or no picture altogether) on them, and then putting them in different well-trafficked areas of some public place.
There is some research that claims the feeling of being watched motivates you to engage in more prosocial behavior. Our gaze recognition ability is apparently hard for us to suppress even when we try to intentionally. When I think about times when I've been around friends, however, I usually feel the pressure to act in a way I feel will impress that specific friend, which is not necessarily pro-social. I imagine the disembodied eyes are not registered as "friends" and heighten our anxiety about who might be looking at us. I wonder whether having pictures of your role models in your workspace and people in your life who encourage you to do well when you talk to them might encourage you to engage in behavior more in line with those virtues you'd like to cultivate. Especially if you intentionally go for pictures where the people in them are looking at the camera directly.