Altering the timing of a decision on the basis of gaze manipulates choices.
People asked to choose between two written moral statements tend to glance more often towards the option they favour, experimental psychologists say. More surprisingly, the scientists also claim it’s possible to influence a moral choice: asking for an immediate decision as soon as someone happens to gaze at one statement primes them to choose that option.
It’s well known that people tend to look more towards the option they are going to choose when they are choosing food from a menu, says Philip Pärnamets, a cognitive scientist from Lund University in Sweden. He wanted to see if that applied to moral reasoning as well. “Moral decisions have long been considered separately from general decision-making,” he says. “I wanted to integrate them.” Read more in Nature.