Just over half of participants in survey of moral opinions argued for the reverse of what they first claimed when their answers were secretly switched.
The thoroughly delightful study is open-access from PLOS One but is also described in a news piece for Nature.
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.
Don’t miss the video of the ‘trick questionnaire’ in action.
Link to Nature News coverage of the study.
Link to full text of study.
No comments:
Post a Comment