Cognitive accessibility can measure morality shifting indirectly via lexical decision tasks.

Evidence

In a second study, we aimed at testing the morality shifting hypothesis by assessing cognitive accessibility of the various morality principles, instead of using a self-report measure of the importance of such principles. As in the previous study, participants read an article depicting in-group or out-group atrocities, and in an allegedly unrelated study, they carried out a lexical decision task in which they had to decide, as quickly and accurately as possible, whether a string of letters that appeared on the computer screen was a word or a nonword. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2132

Categorization

• QUESTION: This implicit measure of moral-principle accessibility is a methodological trick worth remembering for designing studies that avoid demand characteristics.
• XREF: connects to: Norms and values can be cognitively examined, unlike bare preferences — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 61