Attention and moral behavior

•Information search and processing are an integral part of moral decision making.•Eye-tracking is an useful tool to investigate automatic and intuitive processes.•Principles of interactive activation & mutual constraint satisfaction guide decisions.

Moral judgments and decisions are accompanied by specific patterns of attention, which can be indicative for the underlying cognitive processes. In this opinion paper we address methodological, theoretical and empirical issues concerning the relation between attention and morality. First, we discuss potential advantages of using measures of attention based on eye-tracking to investigate processes of judgment and choice in general and concerning morality in particular. Second, we review empirical studies and identify regularities concerning attention patterns in moral judgments. Third, taking into account these findings we provide suggestions for the development and testing of more detailed and better formalized cognitive process models for moral behavior based on interactive activation and parallel constraint satisfaction mechanisms.