Moral psychology
Do trolley-problem judgments hold up in familiar or real situations?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Whether people think a bystander or an involved person should sacrifice one to save several flipped depending on whether the dilemma was about a runaway train, a hypothetical game show, or a real game show played in the lab.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Study 1: between-subjects hypothetical vignettes crossing agent role (participant vs onlooker) with context (train, large game show, small game show); Study 2: real lab quiz where actors decided and observers judged.
- N
- N=202 · 202 subjects in the Study 2 laboratory experiment; the Study 1 methods section (and its sample size) is missing from the available text.
- Population
- Adults recruited via a UK university e-bulletin for Study 2; Study 1 sample not described in the available text.
- Outcome
- Ratings of how right or wrong the action was and whether the agent should act; actual button-press decisions in Study 2; ratings of blame, responsibility, causation and intention in Study 1.
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Key findings
In the train version, acting was judged more right for an involved passenger than a bystander, but in the hypothetical game show this reversed and acting was judged more right for an audience member than a contestant. Differences between contexts in judged rightness were linked to how much blame people assigned. In the real lab game, the role effect on should-judgments reverted to the train pattern, the effect on rightness ratings disappeared, and most actors pressed the button (78.57% of players and 76.67% of audience members) even though average rightness ratings sat on the wrong side of the scale.
Methodology
In Study 1, people read hypothetical dilemmas with the same structure as the classic trolley problem, set either on a train or in a game show where contestants would lose winnings, and judged an actor who was either involved in the situation or just an onlooker. In Study 2, 202 people took part in a real computer quiz for cash; when five players were about to be knocked out, an actor (a player or an audience member) could press a button to save them at the cost of one other player, while observers rated whether the actor should press it.
Limitations
The available text lacks the Study 1 methods, so the Study 1 sample size, recruitment and exact vignettes cannot be checked here. The train and game-show versions differ in two ways at once (familiar setting and economic rather than lethal harm), so the authors can only argue, not show, that context rather than harm type drove the reversal. The real-game effects were modest (the target-role trend in Study 2 was only marginal) and the harms were small sums of money, so the findings may not extend to serious real-life moral choices. The blame and responsibility results are correlations, and the authors explicitly make no claim about causal direction.
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