Biasing moral decisions by exploiting the dynamics of eye gaze

Abstract

Eye gaze is a window onto cognitive processing in tasks such as spatial memory, linguistic processing, and decision making. We present evidence that information derived from eye gaze can be used to change the course of individuals' decisions, even when they are reasoning about high-level, moral issues. Previous studies have shown that when an experimenter actively controls what an individual sees the experimenter can affect simple decisions with alternatives of almost equal valence. Here we show that if an experimenter passively knows when individuals move their eyes the experimenter can change complex moral decisions. This causal effect is achieved by simply adjusting the timing of the decisions. We monitored participants' eye movements during a two-alternative forced-choice task with moral questions. One option was randomly predetermined as a target. At the moment participants had fixated the target option for a set amount of time we terminated their deliberation and prompted them to choose between the two alternatives. Although participants were unaware of this gaze-contingent manipulation, their choices were systematically biased toward the target option. We conclude that even abstract moral cognition is partly constituted by interactions with the immediate environment and is likely supported by gaze-dependent decision processes. By tracking the interplay between individuals, their sensorimotor systems, and the environment, we can influence the outcome of a decision without directly manipulating the content of the information available to them. (6), and in the competition between different cognitive representations (7-9). Many studies have explored these tensions, finding that moral decisions can be influenced by priming, highlighting, or framing one factor over another (4-6, 9). Despite this, almost no attention has been devoted to how moral deliberation is played out in the very moment of choice or what effect this might have on the decision process itself. In the current experiments we focused on the temporal dynamics of moral cognition. We hypothesized that tracking the gaze of participants while they decided between two options would provide sufficient knowledge that could be exploited to influence the outcome of the moral deliberation.Our hypothesis is derived from an understanding of human cognition that emphasizes dynamic interaction between cognition and environment through sensorimotor activation, a position supported by converging lines of evidence (10-31). Gaze patterns in humans reflect the course of reasoning during spatial indexing tasks both in adults (10, 11) and in infants (12). Evidence from neural stimulation shows that saccadic programming and perceptual decisions develop together in the monkey brain (15,16). In decision tasks, before asserting their preference for faces or similarly valued snack foods people look more toward the alternative they are going to choose (17,19). For example, the attentional driftdiffusion model (aDDM) proposes a computational mechanism underlying choice whe...

Moral Perception

“…The experimenters randomly selected one of the two choices, (e.g., 'sometimes justifiable') and prompted participants' decisions at a moment that they had either viewed the assigned option longer or were currently fixating on it. This led participants to endorse moral statements that the experimenters had randomly, and surreptitiously, selected [10]. These findings suggest that where one looks both tracks and determines moral judgment.…”

Prospect theory reflects selective allocation of attention.

“…Like Armel et al (2008) and Pärnamets et al (2015), we manipulated participants' attention allocation by varying the presentation time for specific types of information.…”

Encoding decisions and expertise in the operator's eyes: Using eye-tracking as input for system adaptation

“…To the authors' knowledge, this study is amongst the first research that assessed the possibility to increase suggestion relevance from a DSS with eye-tracking. Previous studies did use ocular data to read decision-making with a real-time perspective, but this was done to modify the participant's decisions, and not to better adapt a system (Pärnamets et al, 2015).…”