3 ms·

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/10.1177/095679761982

by 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.

by gjm11 6y ago

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.