In a recent paper Caruso and Gino have examined the effects of closing one’s eyes on moral judgment.
The authors show that keeping one’s eyes open or closed morally matters, at least from a descriptive perspective.
Participants were confronted with two moral scenarios: One described a morally good action, another described a morally wrong action. Relative to open eyes subjects, subjects whose eyes were kept closed gave more polarized moral judgments. Morally wrong actions were judged more unethical and morally good actions were considered more ethical than in open-eyes controls. Furthermore, participants with closed eyes reported to be less likely to behave immorally and more likely to behave morally than controls. Keeping one’s eyes closed both increases the average offer in a Dictator Game (a measure which normally correlates with pro-sociality) and is associated with enhanced mental simulation, that is creating mental representations that imitate events or objects in the mind. The higher the amount of mental simulation, the more unethical morally wrong actions were deemed to be by the participants.
Therefore it could be conjectured that closing one’s eyes exerts an effect on moral judgments through mental simulation. In turn mental simulation would be connected with amplified emotional responses. This conjecture seems to be buttressed by the result of a final experiment: Instructing open eyes subject to mentally simulate has the same effect on moral evaluation than keeping one’s eyes shut.
From the moral and social standpoint, it is interesting to notice that closing one’s eyes may be seen as a cheap and non-biomedical form of moral enhancement.
The authors suggest that, by closing her eyes when deliberating and evaluating, a moral agent could be less likely to perform morally wrong actions, since people would “simulate the decision they are facing more extensively and experience its emotional components more vividly”.
Even though it is not obvious that different substantive ethical theories agree on the fact that some effects on decision-making are indeed positive and not negative, this suggestion underlines an interesting point: Instead of discussing the use of drugs and/or sophisticated forms of direct intervention on the brain, the current debate on moral enhancement should perhaps devote more attention to little behavioral ‘tricks’.These costless contrivances were already known by the Stoics of old, who invited rulers to count up to ten before taking a decision. Relatively cheap behavioral research could tell us more about the effects of simple actions on decision making and significant changes in moral behavior could be perhaps achieved if we merged this behavioral knowledge into existing forms of moral education. The same holds for designing institutions in such a way that the agents’ biases are exploited to maximize social utility, e.g. by imposing default settings that produce desirable social consequences, as in the case of opt-out policies for organ donation. High technology can be fascinating, but low technology techniques may sometimes be underestimated and unexploited.
Eugene M. Caruso, Francesca Gino. 2010. Blind ethics: Closing one’s eyes polarizes moral judgments and discourages dishonest behavior. Cognition 118: 280–285 doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2010.11.008
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