Psychology ’s favourite moral thought experiment doesn’t predict real-world behaviour

By Christian Jarrett Would you wilfully hurt or kill one person so as to save multiple others? That’s the dilemma at the heart of moral psychology’s favourite thought experiment and its derivatives. In the classic case, you must decide whether or not to pull a lever to divert a runaway mining trolley so that it avoids killing five people and instead kills a single individual on another line. A popular theory in the field states that, to many of us, so abhorrent is the notion of deliberately harming someone that our “deontological” instincts deter us from pulling the lever; on the other hand, the more we intellectualise the problem with cool detachment, the more likely we will make a utilitarian or consequentialist judgment and divert the trolley. Armed with thought experiments of this kind, psychologists have examined all manner of individual and circumstantial factors that influence the likelihood of people making  deontological vs. utilitarian moral decisions. However, there’s a fatal (excuse the pun) problem. A striking new paper in Psychological Science finds that our answers to the thought experiments don’t match up with our real-world moral decisions. Dries Bostyn and his colleagues at Ghent University recruited nearly 300 participants. All answered several hypothetical moral dilemmas derived from the classic trolley dilemma – for instance, in a building on fire, they had to say whether they would push a man through a locked win...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Methods Morality Source Type: blogs