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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