Biasing Moral Decisions Using Eye Movements: Replication and Simulation
- James Falandays, Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced, Merced, California, United States
- Michael Spivey, Cognitive & Information Sciences, UC Merced, Merced, California, United States
AbstractA current debate concerns the degree to which moral reasoning is susceptible to bias from low-level perceptual cues. Pärnamets et al. (2015) reported that moral decisions could be biased by manipulating the timing of a prompt to respond via measurement of eye gaze, but these results were critiqued by Newell and Le Pelley (2018) as a potential design artifact. To reconcile these findings, we first replicate the previous experiments with an adjusted stimulus set. Then, we present the results of a drift-diffusion model that simulates our findings, offering an account of the mechanism by which the gaze-based timing manipulation can bias moral decision-making.