Real people making real moral choices in the trolley problem

What is it about?

For decades, psychologists have used the famous "trolley problem" to study moral decisions—asking whether people would harm one person to save five others. But these studies only measured what people say in imaginary scenarios, not what they actually do with real consequences. We created a laboratory experiment where participants faced an actual dilemma: allow two people to receive painful (but safe) electric shocks, or redirect the shock to one person instead. Participants made real decisions affecting real people, then explained their reasoning. We found that moral decision-making is more complex than traditional theories suggest. While hypothetical responses somewhat predicted real behavior, physical proximity and victim gender had minimal effects on decisions. Most surprisingly, when facing the same dilemma twice, one-third of participants switched their choice—primarily to distribute harm more fairly. People's explanations revealed diverse motivations beyond "greater good" versus "do no harm" reasoning. Those who chose to harm one gave cost-benefit explanations, but those who refused showed varied reasoning: concerns about responsibility, beliefs that suffering is easier in groups, and emphasis on equal rights. These findings suggest researchers need to expand theories of moral psychology to better capture how people actually navigate difficult moral trade-offs in real situations.

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Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash

Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This is one of the first studies to test people's moral decisions with real consequences rather than purely hypothetical scenarios. We found that while hypothetical judgments somewhat predict real behavior, people's actual decision-making reveals much more complexity than traditional "greater good" versus "do no harm" frameworks capture. Most significantly, we show that moral decisions are heavily shaped by broader context, not just the immediate situation. When people face the same dilemma twice, many change their decision based on what happened previously. This demonstrates that people's moral intuitions depend on temporal context. Itchallenges the standard methodology in moral psychology of presenting people with independent, unrelated scenarios and has important implications for understanding real-world ethical decision-making.