Moral Judgments and Visual Attention: An Eye- Tracking Investigation

When making moral judgments people often make snap decisions and then highlight information that confirms that preliminary judgment, a phenomenon referred to as “motivated moral reasoning.” The current study uses eye-tracking technology to examine whether people are also “motivated moral perceivers” – that is, whether people disproportionally attend to visual information that is consistent with their moral judgments when evaluating morally challenging situations. To examine this tendency, participants were presented with a set of classic dilemmas in which an individual or group must die in order for another individual or group to live. Participants were then presented with visual images of the parties involved in the dilemmas. I predicted that people would avoid looking at the individual or group they decided to sacrifice, focusing instead on the individual or group they decided to save. My results confirmed that people selectively attended less to the image of the individual or group they had decided to kill or let die. Moral norms, what people consider to be “right” and “wrong,” are the foundations for values and ethics in every culture. Moral judgments, therefore, are people’s decisions about the rightness or wrongness of an action based on social values (Ditto, Pizarro, & Tannenbaum 2009; Haidt 2001). People often feel that an action must be either right or wrong; there is no relativism, so they search for rationality to justify judgments. These judgments influence acceptance, punishment, or Kastner: Moral Judgments and Visual Attention 115 other repercussions of a person’s behavior based upon how their actions are evaluated in a moral context. The study of how humans form these moral judgments and explain their conclusions is thus integral to understanding how moral reasoning can be influenced. Haidt (2001) uses a lawyer vs. judge analogy to explain different moral reasoning processes that result in moral judgments. The judge uses bottom-up processing to think rationally and to sift through information to seek the truth and find justice (Haidt; Ditto et al. 2009). By contrast, the lawyer utilizes top-down processing to look for information to confirm the conclusion, plea or accusation, of the client. Ditto et al. also calls this lawyerly thinking “motivated moral reasoning,” describing a phenomenon in which one’s judgment is motivated by a desire to reach a particular moral conclusion. Previous research shows that in the process of moral reasoning most people prefer to think they are judges (and, indeed, researchers themselves have classically viewed people as judges – e.g. Kohlberg 1969; Piaget 1932). However, they are actually more similar to lawyers who make initial intuitive judgments and when faced with social pressure to justify them, turn to moral reasoning to explain the decision post hoc (Haidt; Ditto et al.). In both processes, moral reasoning is a conscious search for evidence to support a moral judgment (Haidt). Moral reasoning is a phenomenon of “confirmation bias,” which refers to the process of unintentionally gathering and using information that selectively confirms a previously held belief (Nickerson 1998). The difference between the traditional understandings of moral reasoning and confirmation bias is intentionality. As explained by the judge/ lawyer analogy, the “lawyer” is fully aware of the conclusion he or she intends to validate and his or her moral reasoning is motivated to confirm it. Confirmation bias is an automatic process of unconscious case-building to support a predetermined conclusion wherein humans trick themselves into thinking they are judges even though they are thinking like biased lawyers (Nickerson). People use confirmation bias in many decision making processes in life, not only moral judgments. Scientists, judges (ironically), doctors, and politicians have all been shown to be susceptible to gathering and manipulating facts to confirm a held belief (Nickerson). While traditionally moral judgments were thought to follow a process of reasoning using confirming evidence, 116 Chrestomathy: Volume 9, 2010 newer research shows judgments happen before reasoning. Recently, Haidt (2001) challenged the traditional supposition that moral decisions were reached through a process of reasoning that concluded with a judgment founded upon that reasoning, that moral reasoning involved a conscious process of thinking about linking facts together systematically and logically to reach an informed (and impartial) decision. Haidt postulated instead a model in which moral decisions are generated via intuition – an unconscious, implicit process that occurs without careful consideration and is influenced by innate individual and cultural biases. People employ their intuitions much like an attitude or heuristic, a general “rule of thumb” for solving a problem, in order to make quick, visceral decisions about moral situations. The “social intuition” model states that when confronted with a moral dilemma people make intuitive judgments first, only afterward supplying a reasoning created post hoc to provide justification for the decision (Haidt). They first use perception to “see the truth” and then seek the facts to justify that perceived truth. People often falter in this process when attempting to produce a justification that explains their judgment, a phenomenon Haidt calls “moral dumbfounding” (Haidt). While research has illuminated the degree to which cognitive processes are biased by rapidly forming, intuitive moral judgments, less is known about the biasing of incoming information at the level of visual perception. When visually processing incoming information, viewers often visually attend to information that confirms previous decisions, evidence of confirmation bias. When people are asked to make a preliminary decision and then are presented with options to select to learn more information that either reinforces or counters the choice they have made, they will choose to read confirming information (Jonas et al. 2001). People change the way they search a visual field based on what they want to confirm; that is, they use confirmation bias to skew perception to be consistent with a previous decision. Confirmation bias can also be thought of as a failure to search for negative evidence (Goldstone 1993). According to Goldstone, there is a bias towards attending to objects mentioned in instructions and away from those not mentioned. Motivated moral reasoning (a conscious process) is often susceptible to bias and can be considered a subset of confirmation bias. We know control of truth seeking happens at Kastner: Moral Judgments and Visual Attention 117 the level of cognition, but research is lacking on how people regulate incoming visual information that is consistent with their preformed moral judgments. In a related field of study, differences in visual attention have been studied in conjunction with personality. Luo and Isaacowitz (2007) studied dispositional optimism (the belief that good future outcomes will occur across domains) and attention to negative or positive information regarding skin cancer. Using an eye-tracking device, the researchers measured whether participants looked at positive, neutral, or negative text and images of skin cancer and correlated the results with reported measures of optimism. Those who were low in dispositional optimism or high in health-related optimism looked more at negative or neutral information, whereas those who were more optimistic looked more at positive and less at negative stimuli. This study showed that people regulate incoming information consistently with their preestablished dispositions, a function of confirmation bias driven by personality. While this study did not examine moral reasoning, it is an important indication that people control visual input consistent with their sense of relevance and their dispositional outlook. Beyond the area of research on temperament, scholars have studied visual attention to images in the context of avoiding anxiety producing situations. Eye-tracking technology provides an interesting tool for the examination of visual attention in anxiety provoking scenarios. Mühlberger, Wieser, and Pauli (2008) used an eye-tracking device to track looking patterns at emotional faces or neutral objects in the presence or absence of an emotion induced condition, public speaking. Participants were either told that they would be giving a presentation after the experiment or were told nothing. All participants looked at a series of paired happy face/angry face, happy face/neutral object, and angry face/neutral object images and eye-tracking was used to record gaze. When in the fear (of public speaking) condition, participants initially avoided the faces and then looked more at the happy than angry faces when each was paired with neutral objects. From this study the authors conclude that social anxiety induced avoidance of faces regardless of expression and that faces were more meaningful for anxious people. The Mühlberger et al. study used eye-tracking to assess gaze allocation in socially arousing situations, but in the absence 118 Chrestomathy: Volume 9, 2010 of moral judgment. In addition to confirmation bias, disposition, and social anxiety, visual attention has also been used in the study of social dominance (Maner, DeWall, & Gailliot 2008). All people visually attend more to images of men and women displaying gender-specific forms of social dominance. This selective attention, like confirmation bias, happens unwittingly and confirms social cues. Evolution theories maintain that selective attention in threatening situations is adaptive to human functioning. Maner et al. urged that more research on the automatic processes of perception needs to be performed to better understand higher level cognitive processes such as moral judgments. The current study answers this call by seeking to demonstrate the importance of perception to executive reasoning. This study uses eye-tracking technology to explore the relationship between people’s moral judgments about morally challenging situations and their visual attention to related images. People are motivated moral reasoners subject to confirmation bias and moral dumbfounding, but do they skew the justifications they develop at the deeper perceptual level? Are people motivated moral perceivers? Eye-tracking has been utilized by researchers in many types of assessment including optimism (Luo & Isaacawitz 2007), social anxiety (Mühlerberger et al. 2008), and social dominance (Maner et al. 2008), but this is the first to explore the relationship between moral decision making and gaze patterns. I am interested in the degree to which people control incoming sensory information in order to conform to a moral judgment. People are generally motivated to keep their initial judgment consistent and therefore seek confirming information, perhaps through visual means. Given what we know about motivated moral reasoning, we should expect people to attend to visual stimuli that is consistent with their moral judgment and avoid stimuli that is inconsistent.