© Lund UniversityThe study is the first to demonstrate a connection between gaze and moral choices, but it is based on previous studies which have shown that for simpler choices, such as choosing between two dishes on a menu, our eye movements say what we will eat for dinner before we have really decided.
Our opinions are affected by what our eyes are focusing on in the same instant we make moral decisions. Researchers at Lund University and other institutions have managed to influence people's responses to questions such as "is murder defensible?" by tracking their eye movements. When the participants had looked at a randomly pre-selected response long enough, they were asked for an immediate answer. Fifty-eight per cent chose that answer as their moral position.
The study shows that our moral decisions can be influenced by what we are looking at when we make the decision. Using a new experimental method, the researchers tracked participants' eye movements and demanded an answer when their eye rested on a randomly pre-selected answer.
The researchers, from the Division of Cognitive Science at Lund University, University College London (UCL) and the University of California, Merced, studied in real time how people deliberate with themselves in difficult moral dilemmas. The participants had no idea that the researchers were carefully monitoring how their gaze moved in order to demand an answer at the right moment. The results showed that the responses were systematically influenced by what the eye saw at the moment an answer was demanded.
"In this study we have seen that timing has a strong influence on the moral choices we make.
The processes that lead to a moral decision are reflected in our gaze. However, what our eyes rest on when a decision is taken also affects our choice," explained Philip Pärnamets, cognitive scientist at Lund University and one of the authors of the study.
The study is the first to demonstrate a connection between gaze and moral choices, but
it is based on previous studies which have shown that for simpler choices, such as choosing between two dishes on a menu, our eye movements say what we will eat for dinner before we have really decided.
"What is new is that
we have demonstrated that if eye movements are tracked moment by moment, it is possible to track the person's decision-making process and steer it in a pre-determined direction," said Petter Johansson, a reader in cognitive science at Lund University.
The thought process needed to reach a moral position is thus interlinked with the process of viewing the world.
"Today, all sorts of sensors are built into mobile phones, and they can even track your eye movements," said Daniel Richardson, director of the Eye Think Lab at UCL. "By documenting small changes in our behaviour, our mobiles could help us reach a decision in a way that has not been possible before."
Journal Reference:
Philip Pärnamets, Petter Johansson, Lars Hall, Christian Balkenius, Michael J. Spivey, Daniel C. Richardson.
Biasing moral decisions by exploiting the dynamics of eye gaze.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015; 201415250 DOI:
10.1073/pnas.1415250112
The researchers of this Swedish study assert that it: “..demonstrates that moral choices are no different from their preferential and perceptual counterparts; they are highly constrained and coupled to the immediate environment through sensory interaction.”
The researchers imposed a time limit of 3 seconds for the subjects to answer 63 “moral” and 35 “factual” questions. The subjects were asked to express their confidence in the answer during an additional 1-second timeframe. Answers after these time limits were discarded.
Could you give a 3-second informed decision that reflected your true feelings to the “Inflicting emotional harm is just as bad as inflicting physical harm” question, and then express your confidence on a 1-7 scale within 1 second? How about the “Developing a child’s character is central to raising it good” question?
The supplementary material showed that researchers “..justified our design. When no time-out condition was included, 33% of participants realized that their eye movements were influencing the timing of the trial.” The 3-second timeframe was thus imposed to keep the subjects from gaming the experiment rather than to properly model moral decision-making.
The study begins by stating: “Moral cognition arises from the interplay between emotion and reason..” I don’t see that 3 seconds allows a person’s feeling brain to connect with their thinking brain to produce emotionally informed yet reasoned successive responses to a 98-question battery.
But the time period wasn’t the only area I question. The researchers focused on eye gaze as the important factor. However, each subject’s eye gaze is not necessarily the same. It is learned behavior that may have many historical components.
Other studies found that we pay attention to the present through the windows of perception that we’ve developed from our past, and our long-term memory usually selects what we pay closer visual attention to. Individual factors such as each subject’s desire to gain the researchers’ approval, the stress they felt during the experiment, or their conditioning to conform and comply with directions may have also influenced their “moral” decisions.
If you force people to make snap judgments within an artificial environment, they may perform with instant conditioned or thinking brain answers, yes. But if the study’s results really support the finding that “..moral choices are no different..” then deciding whether “One should never intentionally harm another person” is no different than a “top of the head” answer to “Is Denmark larger than Sweden?”
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