Originally published by Douglas Keene.
This is sort of scary research. We all like to think our views on moral issues are pretty consistent and not easily shaken. That would be incorrect. They are not consistent and they are easily shaken. At least these are the conclusions reached by this research.
We’ve written before about on which side of the courtroom you want to place your exhibits (it’s on the left), but this is far above and beyond that. According to these researchers, you can actually change someone’s mind about an ethical issue by where you have them looking. And, this is the worst part: it takes less than a second! Here is what they did.
The researchers (from Sweden, the UK, and the University of California) had participants sit at computer screens and listen to 63 different statements taken from Moral Foundations Theory while the researchers measured the participant’s eye gaze. For example, statements like “Murder is sometimes justifiable” would play through their headphones and then two responses would be presented simultaneously on their computer screens: “sometimes justifiable” and “never justifiable”. The participants were told to “choose the alternative they considered morally right”. The researchers measured how long the participant looked at each alternative response and found the participant’s chose the response at which they gazed for a longer period of time.
So the researchers wanted to see if they could “make” the participants choose a specific answer by simply waiting until the participant had looked at the response identified by the researchers as the “target” response longer than the alternate response on their screen. They recruited new participants for two additional experiments and sure enough.
By monitoring eye gaze and requiring a decision from the participant as soon as they had looked at the target response longer than the non-target response—the researchers were able to bias the participants’ moral decisions toward the randomly set ‘target’ response.
Even on moral questions the participants described as “important”, researchers were able to steer them toward the target response 80% of the time! It’s all about where you fixate your gaze. Or, as I thought about it, you endorse whatever you are thinking about when the music stops. Indeed, say the researchers, “the process of arriving at a moral decision is not only reflected in a participant’s eye gaze, but can also be determined by it”.
From a litigation advocacy perspective, this is a good reason to be thankful eye gaze science is not perfected and used by opposing counsel. But it is also a good reason to be wary of manipulation in the courtroom. We’ve written about priming and how it can influence jurors, about embodied cognition, and even about the persuasive effect of tilting your head.
This research strategy is interesting, because it requires a disruption of the natural thought process used by the person. In a way, it resembles the distortion of findings we see when someone only considers one side of a dispute. The story that imprints on them is the one they go with— and that imprinting can evidently occur quickly. On the other hand, while it is effective, it isn’t possible to really implement it during trial. Some jurors will be looking at one part of an exhibit, while others will be gazing at an alternative. Thankfully, like fMRI imaging, this is technology that is not nearly ready for courtroom use. And as long as both sides are effective in making sure the jurors get the complete story—not a story artificially truncated by researchers or wily opponents, this effect won’t sway your jury. It will only keep you up at night.
Pärnamets P, Johansson P, Hall L, Balkenius C, Spivey MJ, & Richardson DC (2015). Biasing moral decisions by exploiting the dynamics of eye gaze. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 25775604
Curated by Texas Bar Today. Follow us on Twitter @texasbartoday.
from Texas Bar Today http://ift.tt/1G80EAO
via Abogado Aly Website
No comments:
Post a Comment