An Open Letter to Bill Maher From a Muslim American. How to confuse a moral compass. People can be tricked into reversing their opinions on moral issues, even to the point of constructing good arguments to support the opposite of their original positions, researchers report today in PLoS ONE1.
The researchers, led by Lars Hall, a cognitive scientist at Lund University in Sweden, recruited 160 volunteers to fill out a 2-page survey on the extent to which they agreed with 12 statements — either about moral principles relating to society in general or about the morality of current issues in the news, from prostitution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. But the surveys also contained a ‘magic trick’. Each contained two sets of statements, one lightly glued on top of the other. Home. Atlantic Mobile. TED: Ideas worth spreading.