Derailing the trolley: Everyday utilitarian judgments in groups high versus low in psychopathic traits or autistic traits

Abstract

Moral decision-making has been linked with empathy. The present study built on previous work examining the relationship between psychopathy or autism spectrum disorder (ASD), two conditions putatively associated with deficits in empathy, and utilitarian decision-making. Students scoring high on self-report measures of psychopathic or autistic traits were presented with a novel task, ‘Utilitarian Judgments’, and compared to low trait control groups. This study replicated the classic finding that more direct links between the agents’ actions and harm to victims mitigated utilitarian decision-making. It also found that participants made more utilitarian decisions when outcomes involved extreme physical versus everyday social harm. Enhanced utilitarian decision-making was not observed in those scoring high for either psychopathic or autistic traits, although both high trait groups reported that they would experience less discomfort than their low trait counterparts. Verbal reasoning differences were observed for the high autistic trait group, but not the high psychopathic trait group. The dilemmas that have been typically used to explore utilitarian decision-making describe extreme, hypothetical events involving physical or serious emotional harm. The present findings suggest that this might limit the generalisability of the existing literature and over-emphasise the tendency to make utilitarian decisions when considering everyday dilemmas.