jtotheizzoe:

How to confuse a moral compass

Watch this simple trick, used by Lund University (Sweden) researchers to trick people into defending moral arguments that they did not, in fact, originally agree with. By silently switching the questions that survey respondents rated, and then asking them to defend their answers, they demonstrated a phenomenon called “choice blindness”. More than half of people ended up defending a choice they didn’t actually make!

It’s a pretty small sample, and it’s unknown whether different questionnaire subjects would show the same pattern … but it’s another in a long line of studies demonstrating that whether it’s politics, morals or simple beliefs, the human brain has a very hard time letting go of its opinions. 

Even if those opinions aren’t real.

(via Nature News)