13 ms·

Hypothetical Judgment versus Real-Life Behavior in Trolley-Style Moral Dilemmas

66 points by nabla9 6y ago

hntrader 6y ago
The Trolley Problem is a good example of the status quo bias and the opt-in/opt-out framing bias, and it shows how our moral reasoning can be driven by cheap heuristics. Someone else (in this case, the experimenter) has chosen that A (5 people dying) is the default, and so most just go along with that default choice. If the experimenter instead chose NOT(A) (1 person dying) as the default, everyone would go along with that instead. The usual excuse for going along with the default choice (in this case, to kill 5 people instead of 1), is that opting out of the default is "an active choice that leads to death", and that doing "nothing" isn't anything like it morally speaking. I believe this to be a figment of people's imagination used to justify their decision after the fact. They can either choose A or NOT(A). Either way they've made a choice and acted upon that choice, and there's a causal reality that follows from either choice that they made.
- anaerobicover 6y ago
  That should be straightforward to check up on, by randomly choosing which one to present as the default to a large number of people.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ghodith 6y ago
    Why? Do you really think we need to check if people would switch the track from hitting one person to hitting five?
    - wombatmobile 6y ago
      You are incredulous because to you it seems obvious that 1 death is a relatively superior outcome to 5 deaths. But have you considered the possibility that doing nothing means the actor (or the non-actor in such a case) is then not actively responsible for any death? She is then plausibly just an innocent bystander. What you would be testing if you changed the default would be to test the friction involved with taking active moral responsibility i.e. getting involved in a moral choice, versus not getting involved. You are correct that the total number of deaths is going to be what it is, but by not getting involved, the test subject's personal culpability is reduced to zero rather than [1,5]. In practice, the friction is even higher than in theory, because the rules of the game are not so clear and obvious in the field. There is a cognitive overhead to parsing the circumstances and understanding what choices are available. It's easier to not parse the emergency and just turn away.
      - ghodith 6y ago
        I am not incredulous because "it seems obvious that 1 death is a relatively superior outcome to 5 deaths." I am incredulous because it seems obvious that 1 death and no responsibility is a relatively superior outcome to 5 deaths and the responsibility. You ask if I have "considered the possibility that doing nothing means the actor (...) is then not actively responsible for any death." You've gotten this all backwards. The way the trolley experiments are run by default already tests the friction involved with taking active moral responsibility. You are presented with either the option of taking moral responsibility and saving four lives, or not taking moral responsibility and not saving four lives. If you change the default to be a choice between either taking moral responsibility and not saving four lives or not taking moral responsibility and saving four lives, not only is everyone going to choose the second option, you haven't successfully distinguished whether this is because they don't want the moral responsibility or because they wanted to save four lives. Changing the default in this case actually does the opposite of what you want, it emphatically changes the experiment from one that would "test the friction involved with taking active moral responsibility" (friction that acts against the instinct to save four lives) to one that does not! In this new case the "friction involved" works to act against what? People's predisposed instinct to switch the train from the track with one person to the track with five? I don't quite see much friction here, and it turns what was once a task where the 'relatively superior' outcome required a difficult choice into a task where the 'relatively superior' outcome requires no choice at all. You don't actually end up testing anything! (except I suppose, whether the test taker is a psychopath)
- atq2119 6y ago
  The thing is, the trolley problem presents a very theoretical dichotomy. In real life, such dichotomies are usually false. At the very least, the underlying facts are usually less clear. Therefore, "do nothing" is a very good heuristic in practice: it gives the subject more time to try to find a third solution. So yes, not acting is in a sense a choice, but evaluating the usual presentation of the trolley problem is unsuitable for judging whether that choice is moral, or even whether it is optimal in a utilitarian sense.
- NickM 6y ago
  The bias doesn't seem entirely wrong, though, if you look at it outside of these kinds of contrived situations. If you truly believe that not saving a life is equivalent to killing someone, then you have to start accepting some pretty controversial things. For example, if you can statistically save one life by donating a few thousand dollars to a charity that buys mosquito nets for people, does that mean everyone who can spare that money and chooses not to donate is morally equivalent to a contract killer? In both cases, you have one person who ends up richer in exchange for someone else dying, no? Or to take it a step further, what about people who can't afford to donate that money, but could've had enough money to donate more if they'd chosen a different career path? Does that make them less guilty, just because the "opt-out" decision is farther removed from the result? I think most people would say yes, but if you really believe that action is equivalent to inaction then it doesn't seem any different.
  - rfw300 6y ago
    The rough answer is that we have a duty to help to a degree that is reasonable enough that we'll keep doing it. So organizations like Giving What We Can, for example, ask members to pledge to donate 10% of their annual income to effective charities, which is a fairly reasonable amount for middle-class people in a developed nation that won't sacrifice much quality of life. Yes, there is always some subtext that a life could've been saved had you given that much extra. But I think it's a mistake to view moral failure as a binary rather than a scalar; every life saved is that much better and we ought to keep that in mind rather than embracing a kind of nihilism that we're not doing everything we can and therefore we should do nothing.
  - vlovich123 6y ago
    I think you're begging the question. The more steps between an action & an outcome, the more other people need to be involved, etc the less guilty you are. If someone is beaten as a child & then turns into a child predator, we don't convict the parents as guilty for the child predation act. One person killing another is a crime. One country choosing to wage war isn't generally considered to be such. With a charity, the inaction is offset by those that _are_ taking action. The inaction is also mitigated by an awareness of the impact of diminishing returns (there could be other things more worthy of investment in the long term). The trolly example artificially makes the outcome solely dependent on your action, which is extremely rarely/never how things work in reality.
- skizm 6y ago
  > so most just go along with that default choice. Wait, but in the trolley problem the vast majority (over 90%) of people opt to pull the lever and kill the one person. Almost no one goes with the default option unless you tinker with the parameters (the one person is a loved one or something).
whiddershins 6y ago
I think the Trolley Problem is deeply flawed because of the presumption of personal responsibility. I would bet when people put themselves in that position, they don't think of themselves as in charge of the trolley track switching. I would bet if it were reframed as 'you are in charge of the trolleys. All day long, you control the switching of the tracks. Now you see a situation ...' you would get a totally different answer. I mean, whenever I imagine this problem, I think ... I would be nervous to pull some lever. I think subconsciously I factor in the unknown of whether I really understand the situation and the result of my action.
- wongarsu 6y ago
  The youtube channel vsauce tried putting people in this situation by putting them in a fake railroad switching outpost and having the operator step out for a phonecall. They took care to educate the subject exactly on how the system works without them suspecting anything, trying to eliminate many of the factors you mention. The video is well worth a watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sl5KJ69qiA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sl5KJ69qiA
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    So if your life is in the hands of most people, you're as good as dead. That's incredibly depressing.
    - sneak 6y ago
      I think the "in the hands" is the part up for debate. The question is a matter of responsibility, ultimately, in my view. A better rephrase would be "if you are default-dead, you are probably default-dead", which is less depressing.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    Just watched. I agree, it's a really good video.
  - whiddershins 6y ago
13415 6y ago
Many if not most discussions of Trolley problems are about eliciting "intuitive" moral judgments and possibly identifying conflicting principles people might use when coming up with those judgments, not to muse about how people would actually react. I'm sure the authors of this very interesting study are aware of the differences (normative vs descriptive), just wanted to mention this for completeness.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  I came here to comment the same thing. Trolley problems are thought experiments to probe where different moral models (e.g. fair procedure vs. fair outcome) conflict. I've never even heard of them being used to represent what people would actually do in the moment. Especially since such moments are often extreme circumstances that most people would (thankfully) go their entire lives without ever confronting.
  - ravi-delia 6y ago
    I suppose the interesting thing about looking into how people would react in the real world is that some actual ethical systems are attempts to formalize exactly that intuition. Virtue ethics, for instance, fit well into the mold of 'the world is very hard, the best way to avoid screwing up is to stick to the script'. Given that the world is, in fact, very hard, it's pretty tempting.
ChrisArchitect 6y ago
(2018)
js8 6y ago
Judging it hypothetically, I would set the lever half-way in an attempt to derail the trolley.
- smnrchrds 6y ago
  Then the train starts to slide on its side and hits people on both rails.
  - kgwgk 6y ago
    https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/000/727/DenshaDeD_ch01p16-17.png https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/000/727/Den...
dash2 6y ago
Pussies. Experimental economists would have used a real trolley and human victims. Anything less isn't incentive-compatible.
playdead 6y ago
As philosophers keep saying, over and over, the trolley "problem" is just a thought experiment in normative ethics about different types of moral judgment — it's not an actual problem demanding solutions or recommended behaviors, and it's not designed to make claims in cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, etc. The way people actually behave is of course interesting and important, but it's not the issue at stake.
renewiltord 6y ago
The Trolley Dilemma is not a dilemma. We solve it everyday. I solved it yesterday in order to buy a GoPro Max and an Apple Watch. Sorry, African kid, malaria it is. I gotta record myself get my steps walking the Sausalito waterfront. Maybe I'll do that like two or three times and then let this gather dust on a shelf instead of saving that kid's life.
- notretarded 6y ago
  Chortle
wombatmobile 6y ago
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." -- Yogi Berra
carols10cents 6y ago
This is my favorite variation of the trolley problem, which is absolutely tested in real life all the time: https://ruinmyweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/live-laugh-pull-the-lever-22-trolley-problem-memes-8.png https://ruinmyweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/live-laugh... I especially love this variation because I always take the time to put stray carts back in the cart return and get them all in a neat line. And I warm myself with my moral superiority over all you jagoffs.
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  "even though you gain nothing". Gaining a sense of moral superiority is a gain. Quelling some sense of unease around chaos (stray carts) is a gain for some people.
  - carols10cents 6y ago
    Ahh, I see you've read this philosophy classic: https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Piggie-Reading-Nothing-Button/dp/1484726464 https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Piggie-Reading-Nothing-Butto...
- Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  It's interesting how much the stray cart problem varies from place to place. Where I live now it's not an issue at all. Everyone returns their carts so there are no stray carts for anyone to round up. Other places I've lived, it was probably less than half the carts that got placed into the cart return. Judging by the way carts ended up clustered, once a few people didn't return their carts, others saw it as permission to not return their carts either, though they often pushed them to be next to other unreturned carts.
  - carols10cents 6y ago
    And then there are places that have a coin deposit you can get back if you return your cart properly, which provides an interesting comparison of intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation.
alasdair_ 6y ago
In the simple "1 person versus 5 people" scenario, I'd almost certainly NOT pull the lever to save five and kill one. The reason is simple: if I pull the lever, the family of the dead person could likely sue me, which could be devastating for my own family even if I win the case. I'd probably be harmed in all kinds of other ways for taking the action. In addition, my taking an action like this would help deflect blame from the true guilty party - the one who set the experiment up in the first place. Allowing the guilty to avoid punishment doesn't seem especially moral either. As for the more interesting case where some of my loved ones were on both sides of the track, I'd simply have to choose randomly, and make that clear to everyone involved.
gjm11 6y ago
In the sidebar of the SagePub page about the article is a link to another article, commenting on this one: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797619827880 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797619827880 I've read only its first page (the rest one has to pay for), which mentions another study that did the same sort of thing as this one but got the opposite result. In this study, they asked people about what they would do in a trolleyesque problem involving hurting mice, and then they put the people in a situation where (so they believed) they had exactly that choice to make. The experimental subjects were much more likely to choose to shock one mouse rather than letting five be shocked than they had predicted. In the study referenced by the other paper, they did a similar thing except that instead of "giving shocks to mice" it was "taking meals away from human orphans". In this one the result was the other way around: the experimental subjects were less likely to choose to take a meal away from one orphan to save five others from losing a meal than they had predicted. (No mice and no orphans were actually hurt or harmed in either study.) I suspect (with no evidence, and without knowing whether either set of researchers have already proposed this explanation) that what's going on is that what people say they will do is more governed by wanting to look good than what they actually do is; and that, perhaps because the stakes are lower, "shock a mouse" looks worse relative to "allow five mice to be shocked" than "deprive one orphan of a meal" does relative to "allow five orphans to be deprived of a meal".
- nerdponx 6y ago
  I doubt it's entirely about looks. I would sooner believe that it has to do with the limits of human squeamishness not extending far past what we can personally see, touch, and hear. This is the classic problem about war. War is always a hypothetical until you personally experience combat. It's harder to be shocked by drone bombings than infantry raids. Torture that isn't called "torture" is just a tool in the War on Terror. Etc. Same goes for environmental destruction. It's easy to sleep at night after dumping a bunch of chemicals in the river as long as you personally don't depend on the river for your survival.
cowpig 6y ago
> The IP you are accessing the site with (101.032.239.020) has been blocked because it has triggered one of our security measures. Please see the reason below: > Block reason: This IP was identified as infiltrated and is being used by sci-hub as a proxy. > To restore access, please contact onlinesupport@sagepub.com citing this message in full. :( ... does anyone have a mirror?
- SpikedCola 6y ago
  https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8589719/file/8589729.docx https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8589719/file/8589729.doc...
andrewclunn 6y ago
An abstract from a study to show that hypothetical moral / philosophical quandaries are impractical. Okay logicians and empiricists, get ready to have a meta fight about which approach is more out of touch in the comments section of a news aggregator site run by a tech start up firm.
Ambolia 6y ago
Even without moving to the practical realm, if you ask most people if they would slaughter 1 random healthy person if his organs could be used to save 5 people will say no. The trolley with the pulley is too sanitized.
SPBesui 6y ago
I have nothing special to add here, just wanted to bring attention to the excellent episode of The Good Place (S02E06) that handles the Trolley Problem in a humorous (and very literal) way.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

66 points by nabla9 6y ago

The Trolley Problem is a good example of the status quo bias and the opt-in/opt-out framing bias, and it shows how our moral reasoning can be driven by cheap heuristics. Someone else (in this case, the experimenter) has chosen that A (5 people dying) is the default, and so most just go along with that default choice. If the experimenter instead chose NOT(A) (1 person dying) as the default, everyone would go along with that instead. The usual excuse for going along with the default choice (in this case, to kill 5 people instead of 1), is that opting out of the default is "an active choice that leads to death", and that doing "nothing" isn't anything like it morally speaking. I believe this to be a figment of people's imagination used to justify their decision after the fact. They can either choose A or NOT(A). Either way they've made a choice and acted upon that choice, and there's a causal reality that follows from either choice that they made.

anaerobicover 6y ago
That should be straightforward to check up on, by randomly choosing which one to present as the default to a large number of people.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ghodith 6y ago
  Why? Do you really think we need to check if people would switch the track from hitting one person to hitting five?
  - wombatmobile 6y ago
    You are incredulous because to you it seems obvious that 1 death is a relatively superior outcome to 5 deaths. But have you considered the possibility that doing nothing means the actor (or the non-actor in such a case) is then not actively responsible for any death? She is then plausibly just an innocent bystander. What you would be testing if you changed the default would be to test the friction involved with taking active moral responsibility i.e. getting involved in a moral choice, versus not getting involved. You are correct that the total number of deaths is going to be what it is, but by not getting involved, the test subject's personal culpability is reduced to zero rather than [1,5]. In practice, the friction is even higher than in theory, because the rules of the game are not so clear and obvious in the field. There is a cognitive overhead to parsing the circumstances and understanding what choices are available. It's easier to not parse the emergency and just turn away.
    - ghodith 6y ago
      I am not incredulous because "it seems obvious that 1 death is a relatively superior outcome to 5 deaths." I am incredulous because it seems obvious that 1 death and no responsibility is a relatively superior outcome to 5 deaths and the responsibility. You ask if I have "considered the possibility that doing nothing means the actor (...) is then not actively responsible for any death." You've gotten this all backwards. The way the trolley experiments are run by default already tests the friction involved with taking active moral responsibility. You are presented with either the option of taking moral responsibility and saving four lives, or not taking moral responsibility and not saving four lives. If you change the default to be a choice between either taking moral responsibility and not saving four lives or not taking moral responsibility and saving four lives, not only is everyone going to choose the second option, you haven't successfully distinguished whether this is because they don't want the moral responsibility or because they wanted to save four lives. Changing the default in this case actually does the opposite of what you want, it emphatically changes the experiment from one that would "test the friction involved with taking active moral responsibility" (friction that acts against the instinct to save four lives) to one that does not! In this new case the "friction involved" works to act against what? People's predisposed instinct to switch the train from the track with one person to the track with five? I don't quite see much friction here, and it turns what was once a task where the 'relatively superior' outcome required a difficult choice into a task where the 'relatively superior' outcome requires no choice at all. You don't actually end up testing anything! (except I suppose, whether the test taker is a psychopath)
atq2119 6y ago
The thing is, the trolley problem presents a very theoretical dichotomy. In real life, such dichotomies are usually false. At the very least, the underlying facts are usually less clear. Therefore, "do nothing" is a very good heuristic in practice: it gives the subject more time to try to find a third solution. So yes, not acting is in a sense a choice, but evaluating the usual presentation of the trolley problem is unsuitable for judging whether that choice is moral, or even whether it is optimal in a utilitarian sense.
NickM 6y ago
The bias doesn't seem entirely wrong, though, if you look at it outside of these kinds of contrived situations. If you truly believe that not saving a life is equivalent to killing someone, then you have to start accepting some pretty controversial things. For example, if you can statistically save one life by donating a few thousand dollars to a charity that buys mosquito nets for people, does that mean everyone who can spare that money and chooses not to donate is morally equivalent to a contract killer? In both cases, you have one person who ends up richer in exchange for someone else dying, no? Or to take it a step further, what about people who can't afford to donate that money, but could've had enough money to donate more if they'd chosen a different career path? Does that make them less guilty, just because the "opt-out" decision is farther removed from the result? I think most people would say yes, but if you really believe that action is equivalent to inaction then it doesn't seem any different.
- rfw300 6y ago
  The rough answer is that we have a duty to help to a degree that is reasonable enough that we'll keep doing it. So organizations like Giving What We Can, for example, ask members to pledge to donate 10% of their annual income to effective charities, which is a fairly reasonable amount for middle-class people in a developed nation that won't sacrifice much quality of life. Yes, there is always some subtext that a life could've been saved had you given that much extra. But I think it's a mistake to view moral failure as a binary rather than a scalar; every life saved is that much better and we ought to keep that in mind rather than embracing a kind of nihilism that we're not doing everything we can and therefore we should do nothing.
- vlovich123 6y ago
  I think you're begging the question. The more steps between an action & an outcome, the more other people need to be involved, etc the less guilty you are. If someone is beaten as a child & then turns into a child predator, we don't convict the parents as guilty for the child predation act. One person killing another is a crime. One country choosing to wage war isn't generally considered to be such. With a charity, the inaction is offset by those that _are_ taking action. The inaction is also mitigated by an awareness of the impact of diminishing returns (there could be other things more worthy of investment in the long term). The trolly example artificially makes the outcome solely dependent on your action, which is extremely rarely/never how things work in reality.
skizm 6y ago
> so most just go along with that default choice. Wait, but in the trolley problem the vast majority (over 90%) of people opt to pull the lever and kill the one person. Almost no one goes with the default option unless you tinker with the parameters (the one person is a loved one or something).

whiddershins 6y ago

I think the Trolley Problem is deeply flawed because of the presumption of personal responsibility. I would bet when people put themselves in that position, they don't think of themselves as in charge of the trolley track switching. I would bet if it were reframed as 'you are in charge of the trolleys. All day long, you control the switching of the tracks. Now you see a situation ...' you would get a totally different answer. I mean, whenever I imagine this problem, I think ... I would be nervous to pull some lever. I think subconsciously I factor in the unknown of whether I really understand the situation and the result of my action.

wongarsu 6y ago
The youtube channel vsauce tried putting people in this situation by putting them in a fake railroad switching outpost and having the operator step out for a phonecall. They took care to educate the subject exactly on how the system works without them suspecting anything, trying to eliminate many of the factors you mention. The video is well worth a watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sl5KJ69qiA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sl5KJ69qiA
- cbozeman 6y ago
  So if your life is in the hands of most people, you're as good as dead. That's incredibly depressing.
  - sneak 6y ago
    I think the "in the hands" is the part up for debate. The question is a matter of responsibility, ultimately, in my view. A better rephrase would be "if you are default-dead, you are probably default-dead", which is less depressing.
- jlokier 6y ago
  Just watched. I agree, it's a really good video.
- whiddershins 6y ago

13415 6y ago

Many if not most discussions of Trolley problems are about eliciting "intuitive" moral judgments and possibly identifying conflicting principles people might use when coming up with those judgments, not to muse about how people would actually react. I'm sure the authors of this very interesting study are aware of the differences (normative vs descriptive), just wanted to mention this for completeness.

crazygringo 6y ago
I came here to comment the same thing. Trolley problems are thought experiments to probe where different moral models (e.g. fair procedure vs. fair outcome) conflict. I've never even heard of them being used to represent what people would actually do in the moment. Especially since such moments are often extreme circumstances that most people would (thankfully) go their entire lives without ever confronting.
- ravi-delia 6y ago
  I suppose the interesting thing about looking into how people would react in the real world is that some actual ethical systems are attempts to formalize exactly that intuition. Virtue ethics, for instance, fit well into the mold of 'the world is very hard, the best way to avoid screwing up is to stick to the script'. Given that the world is, in fact, very hard, it's pretty tempting.

ChrisArchitect 6y ago

(2018)

js8 6y ago

Judging it hypothetically, I would set the lever half-way in an attempt to derail the trolley.

smnrchrds 6y ago
Then the train starts to slide on its side and hits people on both rails.
- kgwgk 6y ago
  https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/000/727/DenshaDeD_ch01p16-17.png https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/000/727/Den...

dash2 6y ago

Pussies. Experimental economists would have used a real trolley and human victims. Anything less isn't incentive-compatible.

playdead 6y ago

As philosophers keep saying, over and over, the trolley "problem" is just a thought experiment in normative ethics about different types of moral judgment — it's not an actual problem demanding solutions or recommended behaviors, and it's not designed to make claims in cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, etc. The way people actually behave is of course interesting and important, but it's not the issue at stake.

renewiltord 6y ago

The Trolley Dilemma is not a dilemma. We solve it everyday. I solved it yesterday in order to buy a GoPro Max and an Apple Watch. Sorry, African kid, malaria it is. I gotta record myself get my steps walking the Sausalito waterfront. Maybe I'll do that like two or three times and then let this gather dust on a shelf instead of saving that kid's life.

notretarded 6y ago
Chortle

wombatmobile 6y ago

"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." -- Yogi Berra

carols10cents 6y ago

This is my favorite variation of the trolley problem, which is absolutely tested in real life all the time: https://ruinmyweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/live-laugh-pull-the-lever-22-trolley-problem-memes-8.png https://ruinmyweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/live-laugh... I especially love this variation because I always take the time to put stray carts back in the cart return and get them all in a neat line. And I warm myself with my moral superiority over all you jagoffs.

mgkimsal 6y ago
"even though you gain nothing". Gaining a sense of moral superiority is a gain. Quelling some sense of unease around chaos (stray carts) is a gain for some people.
- carols10cents 6y ago
  Ahh, I see you've read this philosophy classic: https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Piggie-Reading-Nothing-Button/dp/1484726464 https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Piggie-Reading-Nothing-Butto...
Mountain_Skies 6y ago
It's interesting how much the stray cart problem varies from place to place. Where I live now it's not an issue at all. Everyone returns their carts so there are no stray carts for anyone to round up. Other places I've lived, it was probably less than half the carts that got placed into the cart return. Judging by the way carts ended up clustered, once a few people didn't return their carts, others saw it as permission to not return their carts either, though they often pushed them to be next to other unreturned carts.
- carols10cents 6y ago
  And then there are places that have a coin deposit you can get back if you return your cart properly, which provides an interesting comparison of intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation.

alasdair_ 6y ago

In the simple "1 person versus 5 people" scenario, I'd almost certainly NOT pull the lever to save five and kill one. The reason is simple: if I pull the lever, the family of the dead person could likely sue me, which could be devastating for my own family even if I win the case. I'd probably be harmed in all kinds of other ways for taking the action. In addition, my taking an action like this would help deflect blame from the true guilty party - the one who set the experiment up in the first place. Allowing the guilty to avoid punishment doesn't seem especially moral either. As for the more interesting case where some of my loved ones were on both sides of the track, I'd simply have to choose randomly, and make that clear to everyone involved.

gjm11 6y ago

In the sidebar of the SagePub page about the article is a link to another article, commenting on this one: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797619827880 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797619827880 I've read only its first page (the rest one has to pay for), which mentions another study that did the same sort of thing as this one but got the opposite result. In this study, they asked people about what they would do in a trolleyesque problem involving hurting mice, and then they put the people in a situation where (so they believed) they had exactly that choice to make. The experimental subjects were much more likely to choose to shock one mouse rather than letting five be shocked than they had predicted. In the study referenced by the other paper, they did a similar thing except that instead of "giving shocks to mice" it was "taking meals away from human orphans". In this one the result was the other way around: the experimental subjects were less likely to choose to take a meal away from one orphan to save five others from losing a meal than they had predicted. (No mice and no orphans were actually hurt or harmed in either study.) I suspect (with no evidence, and without knowing whether either set of researchers have already proposed this explanation) that what's going on is that what people say they will do is more governed by wanting to look good than what they actually do is; and that, perhaps because the stakes are lower, "shock a mouse" looks worse relative to "allow five mice to be shocked" than "deprive one orphan of a meal" does relative to "allow five orphans to be deprived of a meal".

nerdponx 6y ago
I doubt it's entirely about looks. I would sooner believe that it has to do with the limits of human squeamishness not extending far past what we can personally see, touch, and hear. This is the classic problem about war. War is always a hypothetical until you personally experience combat. It's harder to be shocked by drone bombings than infantry raids. Torture that isn't called "torture" is just a tool in the War on Terror. Etc. Same goes for environmental destruction. It's easy to sleep at night after dumping a bunch of chemicals in the river as long as you personally don't depend on the river for your survival.

cowpig 6y ago

> The IP you are accessing the site with (101.032.239.020) has been blocked because it has triggered one of our security measures. Please see the reason below: > Block reason: This IP was identified as infiltrated and is being used by sci-hub as a proxy. > To restore access, please contact onlinesupport@sagepub.com citing this message in full. :( ... does anyone have a mirror?

SpikedCola 6y ago
https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8589719/file/8589729.docx https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8589719/file/8589729.doc...

andrewclunn 6y ago

An abstract from a study to show that hypothetical moral / philosophical quandaries are impractical. Okay logicians and empiricists, get ready to have a meta fight about which approach is more out of touch in the comments section of a news aggregator site run by a tech start up firm.

Ambolia 6y ago

Even without moving to the practical realm, if you ask most people if they would slaughter 1 random healthy person if his organs could be used to save 5 people will say no. The trolley with the pulley is too sanitized.

SPBesui 6y ago

I have nothing special to add here, just wanted to bring attention to the excellent episode of The Good Place (S02E06) that handles the Trolley Problem in a humorous (and very literal) way.

deleted 6y ago

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