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How to confuse a moral compass

Survey 'magic trick' causes attitude reversal.

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People can be tricked into reversing their opinions on moral issues, even to the point of constructing good arguments to support the opposite of their original positions, researchers report today in PLoS ONE1.

The researchers, led by Lars Hall, a cognitive scientist at Lund University in Sweden, recruited 160 volunteers to fill out a 2-page survey on the extent to which they agreed with 12 statements — either about moral principles relating to society in general or about the morality of current issues in the news, from prostitution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

But the surveys also contained a ‘magic trick’. Each contained two sets of statements, one lightly glued on top of the other. Each survey was given on a clipboard, on the back of which the researchers had added a patch of glue. When participants turned the first page over to complete the second, the top set of statements would stick to the glue, exposing the hidden set but leaving the responses unchanged.

Two statements in every hidden set had been reworded to mean the opposite of the original statements. For example, if the top statement read, “Large-scale governmental surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic ought to be forbidden as a means to combat international crime and terrorism,” the word ‘forbidden’ was replaced with ‘permitted’ in the hidden statement.

Participants were then asked to read aloud three of the statements, including the two that had been altered, and discuss their responses.

About half of the participants did not detect the changes, and 69% accepted at least one of the altered statements.

People were even willing to argue in favour of the reversed statements: A full 53% of participants argued unequivocally for the opposite of their original attitude in at least one of the manipulated statements, the authors write. Hall and his colleagues have previously reported this effect, called 'choice blindness', in other areas, including taste and smell2 and aesthetic choice3.

“I don't feel we have exposed people or fooled them,” says Hall. “Rather this shows something otherwise very difficult to show, [which is] how open and flexible people can actually be.”

The study raises questions about the validity of self-report questionnaires, says Hall. The results suggest that standard surveys “are not good at capturing the complexity of the attitudes people actually hold”, he says, adding that the switching technique could be used to improve opinion surveys in the future.

Tania Lombrozo, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, says that the experiment is “creative and careful”, but adds that it would be good to see the findings replicated with a more diverse group of participants and a broader range of claims, including those more likely to play a role in people's everyday judgement and behaviour. “For example, would people fail to notice a change in their judgement concerning the ethics of meat consumption and subsequently provide a justification for a view that isn't their own?” she asks.

The possibility of using the technique as a means of moral persuasion is “intriguing”, says Liane Young, a psychologist at Boston College in Massachusetts. “These findings suggest that if I'm fooled into thinking that I endorse a view, I'll do the work myself to come up with my own reasons [for endorsing it],” she says.

Journal name:
Nature
DOI:
doi:10.1038/nature.2012.11447

References

  1. Hall, L., Johansson, P. & Strandberg, T. PLoS ONE 7, e45457 (2012).

  2. Hall, L., Johansson, P., Tärning, B., Sikström, S. & Deutgen, T. Cognition 117, 5461 (2010).

  3. Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S. & Olsson, A. Science 310, 116119 (2005).

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  1. Avatar for Directory Directory
    Directory Directory

    I do think that people hate to be seen as backtracking after they've publicly declared a statement or taken a stance. It's used by car salesmen â&#x80&#x93 get a customer to verbally agree to several seemingly innocent statements early in the conversation, and the customer will have a much harder time reversing his position later in the deal. listings

  2. Avatar for Directory Directory
    Directory Directory

    People hate to be seen as backtracking after they've publicly declared a statement or taken a stance. It's used by car salesmen â&#x80&#x93 get a customer to verbally agree to several seemingly innocent statements early in the conversation, and the customer will have a much harder time reversing his position later in the deal. listings

  3. Avatar for Kilgore Trout
    Kilgore Trout

    Is this not just a solid example of confirmation bias?

  4. Avatar for Vice City
    Vice City

    Also I do like this article by the way. navneskilt

  5. Avatar for Vice City
    Vice City

    I do think that people will defend their position to the bitter end, rather than admit they were wrong or accept defeat, even to the point of being completely irrational about it. Once you've publicly proclaimed a position, nobody wants to be seen backing down from it. navneskilt

  6. Avatar for Jean SmilingCoyote
    Jean SmilingCoyote

    Maybe it more shows the people have a reading comprehension problem?

  7. Avatar for Robert Landbeck
    Robert Landbeck

    I would suggest the humanities 'moral compass' exists in a state of confusion to begin with and with no solid foundation within reason, is perpetually susceptible to even greater confusion. But anyone wanting to reset that compass, who can shake off their existing prejudices, imagine outside the cultural box of history, stand against the tides of group think, fashionable thought and spin, who have the humility and moral courage to learn something new, not of their own intellectual origin and will TEST this insight for themselves, an intellectual and moral revolution is already under way.Â&#xa0 http://www.energon.org

  8. Avatar for John Smith
    John Smith

    Amazing what mental contortions scientific materialists will go through to justify their conceits.

    Maybe people are, as the Bible plainly says, abysmally vain, stupid, and indifferent to the truth, instead of victims of some superintelligent trickery.

  9. Avatar for Mark Fritz
    Mark Fritz

    I don't understand, the guy taking the survey didn't feel the paper thickness variation when he flipped the page? He didn't feel the sticky glue on the back of the clip board? They must have chosen the most gullible and unobservant individuals they could find. Thirty years ago, this would have never worked, people just aren't as observant as they used to be. They have become sheeple.

  10. Avatar for Jeramie Hicks
    Jeramie Hicks

    Many "how to influence people" type books mention a similar technique. People hate to be seen as backtracking after they've publicly declared a statement or taken a stance. It's used by car salesmen &#8211 get a customer to verbally agree to several seemingly innocent statements early in the conversation, and the customer will have a much harder time reversing his position later in the deal. It's also why in arguments, people will defend their position to the bitter end, rather than admit they were wrong or accept defeat, even to the point of being completely irrational about it. Once you've publicly proclaimed a position, nobody wants to be seen backing down from it.

    Of course, the study here is whether the person even realized the difference in the first place.

  11. Avatar for James Vance
    James Vance

    This "magic trick" would seem to replicate or perhaps validate the underlying principles embodied by "push polling" over the past 30 years or so that has now become a frequent or even commonplace technique in issue-oriented survey practices employed by some partisan groups in many US political campaigns.

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