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The “Who should you save from the careening trolley?” psych experiment now takes heat

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Further to Pulling the chain on yet another iconic social psych study (the claim that perceptions of cleanliness affect moral judgements was not replicated), it turns out that the “trolley problem” is increasingly considered a waste of time.

Trolley problem? From The Atlantic:

“Suppose you’re the driver of a trolley car, and your trolley car is hurtling down the track at 60 miles an hour. You notice five workers working on the track. You try to stop, but you can’t, because your brakes don’t work. You know that if you crash into these five workers, they will all die. You feel helpless until you notice that off to the side, there’s a side track. And there’s one worker on the side track.” …

One recent paper by Harvard’s Joshua Greene and others, which involved MRI scans of people contemplating the trolley, has been cited more than 2,000 times. In 2007, the psychologists Fiery Cushman and Liane Young and the biologist Marc Hauser administered the test to thousands of web users and found that while 89 percent would flip the track switch, only about 11 percent would push the fat man.

That contradiction—that people find giving the man a fatal prod just too disturbing, even though the end result would be the same—is supposed to show how emotions can sometimes color our ethical judgments.

But one group of researchers thinks it might be time to retire the trolley. In an upcoming paper that will be published in Social and Personality Psychology Compass, Christopher Bauman of the University of California, Irvine, Peter McGraw of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and others argue that the dilemma is too silly and unrealistic to be applicable to real-life moral problems. Therefore, they contend, it doesn’t tell us as much about the human condition as we might hope.

Of course it doesn’t. For one thing, we rarely find ourselves in situations marked Moral Dilemma.

The truth is, by the time we are legal adults, most of us have already made enough choices in our lives that we more or less know how we are going to handle new ones, whether we approve our own decisions or not. (There is nothing unusual about people making decisions they know are morally wrong, whether or not they choose to justify them later.)

In any event, in an emergency like the brakes failing, most of us rely on previously learned coping methods and don’t think much at all. Introspection can be fatal in such situations, apart from any other risks run.

It would certainly be of interest psychologically to know how different types of people react in an emergency, but that’s not a good basis for building a moral theory. Too much depends on just doing something, anything, within seconds, whether one has thought it out or not. Whether one would later think it was the right choice or not.

Or … whether one would have made that choice anyway if one had a chance to think about it—whether it seems like a morally correct choice or not.

Question: Could social psychology benefit from information theory? Thoughts?

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

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Comments
Would the reaction by the driver be different if he was an IDer and the five workers on the track were Darwinists?Acartia_bogart
August 5, 2014
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Sigh. I have operated street cars (trolley cars), and the scenario has more holes in it than a lace doily. Top speed for a vintage street car (like the Melbourne W4) is 40 to 45 mph, not 60. Modern light rail cars can do 60 mph or more, but that's not how this scenario is built. In addition to the regular brakes, where the brake shoes press against the tread of the wheels (or against a brake disk), some trolleys have regenerative braking, and some have electromagnetic brakes. Regenerative braking turns the motors into generators, and feeds the power back into the overhead wire, or through a set of resistors. Electromagnetic brakes are found on PCC cars. the brake shoes press against the rail, and are held there by electromagnets. But if all those failed, just throw the controller into reverse. This turns the the motors into generators, but it also connects the motors to each other out of phase. It creates what is called a "bucking current", where the motors are working against each other. I did this accidentally once, and the deceleration almost knocked me off my feet. But I'm not done. Street cars also have bells and whistles, and sometimes, horns. If you make enough noise the workers will notices and get off the track. Plus, there's this new-fangled invention called two way radio. Even the vintage trolley operations use them these days. And, work crews don't just appear randomly on a section of track. Safety rules require the operator to know where there will be track work, and alert the track crews as to when trolleys will be on the track. About the switch.... Any switch that is short enough to be chosen with only seconds before hitting the track workers is way too abrupt to be taken at 60 mph, or even 30 mph. Taking a slow speed switch too fast would result in the car derailing, or even flipping on its side. It might stop the car in time, but would cause injuries and possibly death among the passengers. Any switch that would be long enough to be taken at full speed would leave so much time to slow the car that scenario would lose its urgency. Yes, some trolleys do have transponders that can activate switches. But it takes a fair amount of time for the switch mechanism to move the point, so the decision would have to be made in advance of the scenario's urgency.SteveGoss
August 3, 2014
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As others have pointed out, the scenario is implausible, improbable, and unlikely. It is deliberately designed to channel responses into two no-win categories. If you strip away all the window dressing of tracks, trains, and railway workers, in essence, the test comes down to a choice between killing five people or killing one. That's hardly instructive on a moral level. Most people would not wish to kill anyone, so they naturally choose the lesser of two evils. To then compare this with a scenario involving pushing a guy to his death, is silly. Two irrational scenarios together do not yield a rational conclusion. Interestingly, despite the applications of the data to evolutionary social theory, the test assumes the intrinsic worth of human beings. Replace humans with cattle or with chimpanzees - what does it really matter if five, six, ten, or a hundred are killed, if indeed it is true that we are only assemblages of biochemical components with no eternal future?CalvinsBulldog
August 3, 2014
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The trolley scenario seems unrealistic because of its implausible details, but for a more realistic version of a similar dilemma watch the short film "Most."Dick
August 2, 2014
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OK wait- What if the trolley is full of materialists and the 5 workers are Dawkins, Coyne, Dennett, Myers and Matzke?
I'd be trying to save the trolley from them!Mung
August 2, 2014
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'OK wait- What if the trolley is full of materialists and the 5 workers are Dawkins, Coyne, Dennett, Myers and Matzke? :)' Good old Joe!Axel
August 2, 2014
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Personally, I think the whole discussion here isn’t worth a plug nickel. In our lives we often have to make decisions that involve choosing between to disagreeable outcomes. Politicians have to do that all the time were no matter what they do someone is going to be hurt. The question usually boils down to what direction causes the least amount of harm not whether it is morally right or wrong. If a moral person has to choose one of two people to marry and doesn’t want to hurt either yet knows that in making the decision one of them will be hurt the decision itself becomes a moral dilemma. Besides all of that what the scientists were doing was not being cute but trying to study how our brains physically process that kind of situation. The problem is that the thing got out of hand and became nonsense especially when others got into the picture and turned it into something it was originally never intended to be.fossil
August 2, 2014
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News, I don't agree that there would be no time to think, even if it was a quarter of a second. Making a split second choice to intentionally kill one person or another takes zero time to consider the repercussions, that is why I think it is completely unrealistic. "Quick, kill this innocent stranger guy, to save someone, go!" Who needs any time at all to consider that is something you don't have the right to do.phoodoo
August 2, 2014
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The reality is that most human beings would probably just freeze. Some human beings, particularly someone trained in EMS/fire rescue, might think fast enough to at least do something. No one at all is going to hold a big internal debate about it. The better designed moral values conundrums that I have seen were based on scenarios that assume that one would in fact have time to consider all the issues carefully, in a calm state. So there is at least some element of reality involved.News
August 2, 2014
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OK wait- What if the trolley is full of materialists and the 5 workers are Dawkins, Coyne, Dennett, Myers and Matzke? :)Joe
August 2, 2014
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Yea, I am betting that just about anyone, even if they only had two seconds to think of it, would know that if they push someone on to a train track to kill them instead of someone else, they are probably going to jail, no matter how noble they were trying to be.phoodoo
August 2, 2014
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Has anyone ever wondered why most of the hypothetical questions are so far out to start with? I agree with #2 On another note, none of the social media icons in the sidebar are links.MrCollins
August 2, 2014
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awstar, They are right about silliness in one respect, because in the end all the workers are dead. (as well as the trolly driver and his passengers). Seems to me, we all need to focus on what comes after that. Even people who believe in heaven don't want to be run over by a trolleyvelikovskys
August 2, 2014
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A ridiculous hypothetical situation on so many levels. What about the legal ramifications of causing ones death as opposed to not preventing others? What about the consideration that hopefully at the last second the parameters will change? What if a person simply feels its not their right to play God? Does that make them more or less moral? I think the best question in regards to this study-Why are scientists so stupid?phoodoo
August 2, 2014
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In an upcoming paper that will be published in Social and Personality Psychology Compass, Christopher Bauman of the University of California, Irvine, Peter McGraw of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and others argue that the dilemma is too silly and unrealistic to be applicable to real-life moral problems. Therefore, they contend, it doesn’t tell us as much about the human condition as we might hope.
They are right about silliness in one respect, because in the end all the workers are dead. (as well as the trolly driver and his passengers). Seems to me, we all need to focus on what comes after that.awstar
August 2, 2014
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