People asked to choose between two written moral statements tend to glance more often towards the option they favour, experimental psychologists say. More surprisingly, the scientists also claim it’s possible to influence a moral choice: asking for an immediate decision as soon as someone happens to gaze at one statement primes them to choose that option.

It’s well known that people tend to look more towards the option they are going to choose when they are choosing food from a menu, says Philip Pärnamets, a cognitive scientist from Lund University in Sweden. He wanted to see if that applied to moral reasoning as well. “Moral decisions have long been considered separately from general decision-making,” he says. “I wanted to integrate them.”

In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹, Pärnamets and his colleagues explain how they presented volunteers with a series of moral statements, such as ‘murder is sometimes justified,’ ‘masturbating with the aid of a willing animal is acceptable’ and ‘paying taxes is a good thing.’ Then the psychologists tracked the volunteers’ gaze as two options appeared on a screen. Once the tracker had determined that a person had spent at least 750 milliseconds looking at one answer and 250 milliseconds at the other, the screen changed to prompt them to make a decision. Almost 60% of the time, they chose the most viewed option — indicating, says Pärnamets, that eye gaze tracks an unfolding moral decision.

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