Moral psychology
Does sitting face-to-face change how we answer trolley problems?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Students seated facing each other gave more harm-avoiding answers to moral dilemmas than students seated in rows, and men's answers shifted with seating more than women's did.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Gender by seating (rows facing the front vs round tables facing each other) between-subjects quasi-experiment; students chose a session time, so rooms were not randomly assigned; all completed the same moral dilemma task on their own laptops.
- N
- N=315 · Undergraduates from an introductory psychology pool, 212 of them women; each seating condition held well over a hundred students (the total and group sizes are spelled out in words in the text).
- Population
- Young US undergraduates enrolled in an introductory psychology course at one university
- Outcome
- Proportion of utilitarian choices on moral impersonal (MI) and moral personal (MP) dilemmas, and their difference (moral reasoning difference, MRD, score)
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Key findings
Men approved the utilitarian (harm-for-the-greater-good) action more often than women on both impersonal and personal dilemmas. Everyone seated face-to-face gave fewer utilitarian answers on the impersonal dilemmas, but seating made no reliable difference for the emotionally charged personal dilemmas. On the difference score, seating and gender interacted: men were more harm-avoiding than women when facing others but more utilitarian than women when facing the front, whereas women's scores barely changed across rooms.
Methodology
Undergraduates completed a short online moral decision-making task in one of two classrooms: a standard room with rows facing the front, or a room with round tables where each student faced others across the table. The task contained 20 dilemmas, 5 impersonal (for example, flipping a switch) and 15 personal (for example, pushing someone), and scored how often each person approved the harmful action that saves more lives. The researchers compared men and women across the two rooms on the impersonal score, the personal score, and a new difference score between the two.
Limitations
Participants picked their own session times, so they were not randomly assigned to rooms and other differences between sessions could explain the seating effect. Nobody was asked whether they actually felt watched, so the proposed mechanism (concern about being judged) is untested. The text reports significance but the tables with means and effect sizes are not included, so we cannot judge how large the differences were, and the new difference score has no established validity. Hypothetical trolley-style dilemmas may not reflect real moral behaviour, and the sample was first-year students from one university.
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