Attention and moral behavior

Attentional Control Moderates the Relation between Sympathy and Ethical Guilt

In response to ethical transgressions, some children respond with ethical guilt (e.g., remorse), while others do not. The affective and cognitive precursors of ethical guilt have been widely studied on their own, however, few studies have looked at the interaction of affective (e.g., sympathy) and cognitive (e.g., attention) precursors on ethical guilt. This study examined the effects of children's sympathy, attentional control, and their interaction on 4 and 6-year-old children's ethical guilt. A sample of 118 children (50% girls, 4-year-olds: M_age = 4.58, SD = .24, n = 57; 6-year-old: M_age = 6.52, SD = .33, n = 61) completed an attentional control task and provided self-reports of dispositional sympathy and ethical guilt in response to hypothetical ethical violations. Sympathy and attentional control were not directly associated with ethical guilt. Attentional control, however, moderated the relation between sympathy and ethical guilt, such that sympathy was more strongly related to ethical guilt at increasing levels of attentional control. This interaction did not differ between 4- and 6-year-olds or boys and girls. These findings illustrate an interaction between emotion and cognitive processes and suggest that promoting children's ethical development may require a focus on both attentional control and sympathy.

Temptation shapes dishonesty and can alter working memory

This study shows that participants tend to remember an ambiguous, directional cue as biased towards stimuli associated with a high reward that can be attained dishonestly. Participants saw eight digits presented in a circular arrangement. On some trials, they were asked to report the digit (“Target Digit”) indicated by a jittery cue that was slightly biased in the direction of another digit (“Second Cued Digit”), which was either higher or lower than the Target Digit. Participants were paid based on the reported digit (higher digits meant higher pay) and not based on the accuracy of their report. In this setting, they could make self-serving mistakes by dishonestly reporting the Second Cued Digit when it was higher than the Target Digit. Replicating prior work, participants frequently made such self-serving mistakes. On other trials, after the digits disappeared, participants were asked to reproduce the direction of the jittery cue, without receiving any pay. Results showed that that participants’ reports of the cue were more biased toward high-rewarding digits than low-rewarding digits. This research provides preliminary evidence of a link between attention, dishonesty, and memory, offering an important constraint for theories in behavioral ethics.

Prosocial Preferences Condition Decision Effort and Ingroup Biased Generosity in Intergroup Decision-Making

Ingroup favoritism and discrimination against outgroups are pervasive in social interactions. To uncover the cognitive processes underlying generosity towards in- and outgroup members, we employ eye-tracking in two pre registered studies. We replicate the well-established ingroup favoritism effect and uncover that ingroup compared to outgroup decision settings are characterized by systematic differences in information search effort (i.e., increased response times and number of fixations, more inspected information) and attention distribution. Surprisingly, these results showed a stronger dependency on the in- vs. out-group setting for more individualistic compared to prosocial participants: Whereas individualistic decision makers invested relatively less effort into information search when decisions involved out-group members, prosocial decision makers’ effort differed less between in- and outgroup decisions. Therein, choice and processing findings showed differences, indicating that inferences about the decision process from choices alone can be misleading. Implications for intergroup research and the regulation of intergroup conflict are discussed.

Attentional efficiency does not explain the mental state × domain effect

The reduced importance of intent when judging purity (vs. harm) violations is some of the strongest evidence for distinct moral modules or systems: moral pluralism. However, research has indicated that some supposed differences between purity and harm moral domains are due to the relative weirdness of purity vignettes. This weirdness might lead to a failure to attend to or correctly process relevant mental state information. Such attentional failures could offer an alternative explanation (to separate moral systems) for the reduced exculpatory value of innocent intentions for purity violations. We tested if the different role of intent in each domain was moderated by individual differences in attentional efficiency, as measured by the Attention Network Task. If attentional efficiency explains the reduced exculpatory value of innocent intentions in purity (vs. harm) violations, then we would expect those high (vs. low) in attentional efficiency not to show the reduced exculpatory effect of innocent intentions in the purity (vs. harm) domain. Consistent with moral pluralism, results revealed no such moderation. Findings are discussed in relation to various ways of testing domain-general and domain-specific accounts of the mental state × domain effect, so that we might better understand the architecture of our moral minds.

Oculomotor behavior tracks the effect of ideological priming on deception

The decision to lie to another person involves a conflict between one's own and others' interest. Political ideology may foster self-promoting or self-transcending values and thus may balance or fuel self vs. other related conflicts. Here, we explored in politically non-aligned participants whether oculomotor behavior may index the influence on moral decision-making of prime stimuli related to left and right-wing ideologies. We presented pictures of Italian politicians and ideological words in a paradigm where participants could lie to opponents with high vs. low socio-economic status to obtain a monetary reward. Results show that left-wing words decreased self-gain lies and increased other-gain ones. Oculomotor behavior revealed that gazing longer at politicians' pictures led participants to look longer at opponent's status-related information than at game's outcome-related information before the decision. This, in turn, caused participants to lie less to low status opponents. Moreover, after lying, participants averted their gaze from high status opponents and maintained it towards low status ones. Our results offer novel evidence that ideological priming influences moral decision-making and suggest that oculomotor behavior may provide crucial insights on how this process takes place.

What drives the (un)empathic bystander to intervene? Insights from eye tracking

Norm violations (e.g., unfair transgressions) are often met with punishment even by people who are not directly affected. However, punishing a transgressor is not the only option for a bystander to restore justice. Empathic concerns may dictate instead to give a helping hand to a victim. Using a pre-registered, fully incentivized eye-tracking study (N = 47), we investigated the cognitive mechanism linking bystanders' empathic concern and justice-restoring intervention behaviour. The results show that not only the decision to intervene (i.e., either costly compensating the victim or punishing the transgressor) but also the attention directed towards a victim's payoffs (i.e., measured by the proportion of fixations) during the decision-making period systematically varied with the individual level of empathic concern. Exploring this link further, we additionally instructed participants to focus on specific components of the norm violation, namely the (un)fair conduct of the offender or the victim's feelings. Surprisingly, highly empathic bystanders were more likely to punish the offender when the norm violation was highlighted. However, we did not observe the modulation of the instructed focus on the link between gaze-based measures and empathic concern. Overall, these results provide initial evidence about the interacting impact of empathic concern as well as the focus on specific components of the norm violation when bystanders respond to unfair transgressions.

Visual saliency influences ethical blind spots and (dis)honesty

Recent work suggests that dishonesty results from ethical blind spots: people’s lack of attention to ethical information. In two experiments (one pre-registered) we used eye tracking to investigate when ethical blind spots emerge, and whether they can be reduced through a simple, non-invasive intervention. Participants reported a Target Digit indicated by a jittery cue that was slightly biased in the direction of another digit (the Second-Cued Digit), which could be either higher or lower than the Target Digit. Participants were paid more for reporting higher digits, and were not penalized for making mistakes, thus providing an incentive to cheat. Results showed that participants frequently made self-serving (and rarely self-hurting) mistakes by reporting the Second-Cued Digit when it was more valuable than the target. Importantly, they rapidly gazed at the digit that they would later report, regardless of whether this report was correct or a self-serving mistake. Finally, we were able to reduce or increase the number of self-serving mistakes by respectively increasing or reducing the visual saliency of the Target Digit. We suggest that increasing the visual saliency of morally desirable options is a promising cost-effective tool to curb dishonesty.

Visual Encoding of Social Cues Contributes to Moral Reasoning in Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Eye-Tracking Study

Eye-tracking studies suggest that visual encoding is important for social processes such as socio-moral reasoning. Alterations to the visual encoding of faces, for example, have been linked to the social phenotype of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and are associated with social and communication impairments. Yet, people with ASD often perform similarly to neurotypical participants on measures of moral reasoning, supporting the hypothesis of differential mechanisms of moral reasoning in ASD. The objective of this study was to document visual encoding and moral reasoning in ASD and neurotypical individuals using a visual, ecological, sociomoral reasoning paradigm paired with eye-tracking. Two groups (ASD, Control) matched for age and IQ completed the SoMoral task, a set of picture situations describing everyday moral dilemmas, while their eye movements and pupil dilation were recorded. Moral understanding, decision-making, and justification were recorded. Participants with ASD presented a longer time to first fixation on faces. They also understood fewer dilemmas and produced fewer socially adaptive responses. Despite a similar average level of moral maturity, the justifications produced by participants with ASD were not distributed in the same way as the neurotypical participants. Visual encoding was a significant predictor of moral decision-making and moral justification for both groups. The results are discussed in the context of alternative mechanisms of moral reasoning in ASD.

Visual encoding of social cues predicts sociomoral reasoning

As the first step of social information processing, visual encoding underlies the interpretation of social cues. Faces, in particular, convey a large amount of affective information, which can be subsequently used in the planning and production of adaptive social behaviors. Sociomoral reasoning is a specific social skill that is associated with engagement in appropriate social behaviors when faced with dilemmas. Previous studies using eye tracking suggest that visual encoding may play an important role in decision-making when individuals are faced with extreme moral dilemmas, but it is not known if this is generalizable to everyday situations. The main objective of this study was to assess the contribution of visual encoding to everyday sociomoral reasoning using eye tracking and ecological visual dilemmas. Participants completed the SocioMoral Reasoning Aptitude Level (SoMoral) task while their eye movements and pupil dilation were recorded. While visual encoding was not a predictor of sociomoral decision-making, sociomoral maturity was predicted by fixation count. Thus, in an ecological context, visual encoding of social cues appears to be associated with sociomoral maturity: the production of a justification is associated with volitional encoding strategies. Implications with regards to the dual-process theory of sociomoral reasoning and social information processing are discussed.