Your Moral Compass Is Reversible

scibri writes "Your moral positions may be more flexible than you think. Researchers in Sweden have tricked people into reversing their opinions on moral issues, even to the point of constructing good arguments to support the opposite of their original positions (paper in PLOS ONE). They used a 'magic trick' to reverse a person's responses to such moral issues as 'Large-scale governmental surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic ought to be forbidden as a means to combat international crime and terrorism,' by switching 'forbidden' to 'permitted' when the subject turned the page of the questionaire. When asked to read back the questions and answers, about half of the subjects did not detect the changes, and a full 53% of participants argued unequivocally for the opposite of their original attitude in at least one of the manipulated statements."

Comments

Re:reading comprehension?

[Immerman]

Except that isn't what appears to have happened. FTFA they had people record answers to a few moral questions and then retroactively changed the wording of the question (using some paste and paper trickery) so that their recorded answers actually meant the opposite of what they originally did. When people were then asked to review their answers and discuss/defend their position 53% didn't detect the change and argued for the position opposite their original answer.

Now you could try to argue that all those people misread the question in the first place and consequently mis-answered it so that the trick reversal actually corrected the situation, but that would mean that over half the original answers were not representative of their actual position. The implication being that for such a question you would get a more accurate representation of their position by flipping a coin than by actually asking them, which would seem to be ridiculous and severely undermine the validity of every survey ever done on the planet.