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Personal values colour sentence comprehension within milliseconds
Moral-ethical and political beliefs colour the way people read survey questions. This ‘colouring’ process takes place well before people become aware of their answers to such questions. This phenomenon was recently discovered through brain measurements conducted by Jos van Berkum from the MPI for Psycholinguistics and researchers from the universities of Amsterdam and Utrecht. The findings are reported in Psychological Science.
Jul 27, 2009
The survey questions were based on existing political programmes from a wide range of parties, and focused on issues such as euthanasia, abortion, sperm donation, the legal sale of marihuana, gay marriage and women’s emancipation. Examples are ‘I find euthanasia an acceptable practice’ or ‘I think the growing emancipation of women is a negative trend’. In the experiment, two groups of participants with diametrically opposed value systems (orthodox Christian vs. non-Christian) assessed these statements on a scale ranging from ‘agree’ to ‘disagree’, just as they would in an everyday opinion poll. But this time, researchers also recorded electrical brain waves, EEG, as people were reading the statements (before actually answering them).
Brain responds rapidly and intuitively
Words indicating that the sentence would most likely be at odds with the person’s core beliefs (such as ‘I find euthanasia an acceptable ...’ for orthodox Christian respondents) evoked an almost immediate response in the brain, starting at about 200 milliseconds after reading the evaluative word ('acceptable'). The response differed depending on the participants’ views on the issue in question, but, when elicited, always had the same two components. One of these indicated emotional involvement of the type typically observed with emotionally unpleasant pictures. The other component is always observed with sentences that express something unlikely (for example, ‘I drink a pizza’). Unlike in previous studies, these effects were now determined by the participant’s political and ethical beliefs: statements that were entirely acceptable to one participant proved problematic for others. Such rapid effects of personal value systems had never been identified before.
The results show that people very quickly dislike statements that seem to go against their values system, and that they briefly have a harder time making sense of them. This near-instantaneous influence of personal values on our understanding of language is at odds with current standard models for language comprehension. The findings are also relevant for research on belief systems and questionnaire development.
For more information, contact Jos van Berkum.
Van Berkum, J. J. A., Holleman, B.C., Nieuwland, M., Otten, M., & Murre, J. (2009). Right or wrong? The brain's fast response to morally objectionable statements. Psychological Science.
