Agnosticism / Atheism: Assumptions about Good and Bad Influenced by... Gloves?

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Assumptions about Good and Bad Influenced by... Gloves? Feb 7th 2012, 12:00 I'll bet you think that your attitudes towards "good" and "bad" are primarily influenced by your values, your upbringing, your culture, or maybe even a religion. But there are far more subtle influences that you probably aren't aware of. For example, did you that most people unconsciously associate "good" with their dominant hand side and "bad" with their other side? It gets better: people who lose the use of their dominant hand tend to move the "good" over to the other side with the hand that still works. There's a simple test used for this: show people are cartoon character between two boxes and tell the subject that the character loves zebras and hates pandas, then ask them to place the animals in whatever box seems appropriate. The The team then asked 55 right-handed students to wear a heavy glove on one hand while trying to stand up dominoes. When they were then asked the panda/zebra question, the students were five times more likely to put the zebra in the box corresponding to their mobile hand. "If wearing a glove for a few minutes can reverse our decisions about what's good and bad, maybe the mind is more malleable than we thought" says Casasanto. Source: New Scientist Obviously this experiment didn't address "real" issues around "real" values like abortion and gay marriage... right? Well, not on the surface, but such experiments usually have something to say about "real" issues from an unexpected direction. That's the point: they bypass our usual filters and prejudices and thereby get us to reveal something true about ourselves that we'd probably rather not reveal. On a very basic level, it appears that something as trivial as a heavy glove can influence how you make decisions about what's "good" and what's "bad." We already know that the weight of something can influence how seriously you take what's in it. Who knows what else is influencing your decisions about right and wrong, good and bad, without you realizing it. I'll bet you think that a lot of your conclusions about what's right and wrong are based entirely on reasoned arguments and evidence, right? Well, maybe not.

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