Moral decisions can be influenced by tracking moment to moment movements of the eyes during deliberation, finds new research from Lund University, Sweden, University College London and University of California Merced.

Many of the choices we face in daily life have a moral character, from deciding whether to give money to a homeless person asking for change to separating out recyclables from the trash.

“People often assume that their moral opinions are stable preferences that already exist in their hearts and minds,” says Michael Spivey from the University of California, Merced, “but we hypothesized that many of your moral decisions may arise ‘on the fly’ as a result of how you look at and interact with your environment.”

Using a novel experimental paradigm, the researchers used remote eye-trackers to monitor participants’ gaze while they thought about complex moral questions such as, ‘Is murder sometimes justifiable?’. The participants were presented with two alternatives to each question, and were asked to consider which those they considered to be morally right. Although they were completely unaware of it, participants’ eye movements were […]