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. Each
survey was given on a clipboard, on the back of which the
researchers had added a patch of glue. When participants turned
the first page over to complete the second, the top set of
statements would stick to the glue, exposing the hidden set but
leaving the responses unchanged. Two statements in every hidden
set had been reworded to mean the opposite of the original
statements. For example, if the top statement read, “Large-scale
governmental surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic ought
to be forbidden as a means to co