Trolley Problem Research Articles

Partisanship and the trolley problem: Partisan willingness to sacrifice members of the other party

Do partisans view members of the other party as having lower moral status? While research shows that partisans view the out-group quite poorly, we show that affective polarization extends to expressing a willingness to sacrifice an out-partisan’s life. We report the first study to consider partisanship in the classic “trolley problem” in which respondents are asked whether they would sacrifice an individual’s life in order to save the life of five individuals. We explore this issue with a nationally representative survey experiment in the United States, inquiring about politicized variants of the trolley problem case. First, we vary the political affiliations of both the group of five (to be saved by turning the trolley) and the single individual (to be sacrificed by turning the trolley). We find that individuals are less willing to sacrifice a co-partisan for the sake of a group of out-partisans. These findings go beyond earlier work by suggesting that partisans not only hold negative attitudes and judgments toward political out-groups but also they will at least signal approval of differing moral treatment. We take stock of how these results bear on normative questions in democratic theory.

Counting: How We Use Numbers to Decide What Matters

Counting: How We Use Numbers to Decide What Matters

Does My Driver Share My Moral View? Effects of Humanlikeness and Morality in an Adapted Trolley Problem

As autonomous systems become responsible for more complex decisions, it is crucial to consider how these systems will respond in situations wherein they must make potentially controversial decisions without input from users. While previous literature has suggested that users prefer machinelike systems that act to promote the greater good, little research has focused on how the humanlikeness of an agent influences how moral decisions are perceived. We ran two online studies where participants and an automated agent made a decision in an adapted trolley problem. Our results conflicted with previous literature as they did not support the idea that humanlike agents are trusted in a manner analogous to humans in moral dilemmas. Conversely, our study did support the importance for trust of shared moral view between users and systems. Further investigation is necessary to clarify how humanlikeness and moral view interact to form impressions of trust in a system.

Culpability and Penitence: The Intrinsic Morality of the Trolley Problem

The trolley problem is uniquely illuminating in the world of moral philosophy, and it is relevant to all three schools of ethics: deontological ethics, virtue ethics, and consequentialist ethics. Numerous researchers have written at length about trolley problem variations and real-world applications of ethical dilemmas, but there is a paucity of research pertaining to the worldviews of teenagers in particular; most of the existing literature on trolleyology focuses on the inclinations of adults. The findings of this teenage-centered project suggest that, in a trolleyological context, teenagers are more strongly utilitarian than adults are. Further research can be done to broaden the scope of the topic and ascertain the unique factors that contribute to juvenile morality.

Controlling Smart Technology


 
 
 This work explores some of the key challenges for incorporating appropriate ethical behavior and respect for social norms in highly-autonomous intelligent machines. Starting with the implications of Azimov's Three Laws of Robotics, we discuss the tradeoffs in human values, as encapsulated in the popular philosophical 'Trolley Problem'. We then examine some of the concerns for how smart systems model their worlds and their interactions with humans. The paper continues with a review of artificial moral agency and phronesis, and the techniques being proposed for implementing such agents. It concludes with some notes on recent research directions. This material is primarily an adaptation of work prepared by two of the authors, as part of a report of a series of workshops on machine consciousness, which were held during the summer of 2017.
 
 

Moral Foreign Language Effect on Responses to the Trolley Dilemma amongst Native Speakers of Arabic

Abstract Trolley dilemmas have been tested cross-culturally, but only recently have researchers begun to assess the effect of responding to such dilemmas in a foreign language. Previous studies have found a Moral Foreign Language Effect (MFLE) in trolley dilemmas, whereby subjects who respond to these dilemmas in a foreign language, tend to offer more utilitarian responses. The present study seeks to test whether the MFLE holds amongst native speakers of Arabic. Additionally, the present study seeks to test whether the use of visual images has any effect on responses. For such purposes, four groups were compared: 1) participants responding to trolley dilemmas in English without visual images; 2) participants responding to trolley dilemmas in Arabic without visual images; 3) participants responding to trolley dilemmas in English with visual images; 4) participants responding to trolley dilemmas in Arabic with visual images.

The New Trolley Problem: Driverless Cars and Deontological Distinctions

ABSTRACTDiscussion of the ethics of driverless cars has often focused on supposed real‐life versions of the famous trolley problem. In these cases, a driverless car is in a position where crashing is unavoidable and all possible crashes risk harm: for example, it can either continue on its current path and crash into five pedestrians or swerve and crash into one pedestrian. There are significant disanalogies between the human versions of the trolley problem and situations faced by driverless cars which affect the application and moral significance of key deontological distinctions, such as the distinction between doing and allowing harm. The application and moral significance of the doing/allowing distinction in the context of the behaviour of driverless cars depend on (a) our conception of the behaviour of driverless cars; (b) the forms of driverless cars that are developed and used; (c) the background expectations of programmers/manufacturers/owners of driverless cars and the conditions of being able to put those cars on the roads. These are as yet unsettled – and may even be undetermined. Nonetheless, trolley problems may still be useful in thinking about the ethics of driverless cars.

A practical role-based approach for autonomous vehicle moral dilemmas

Autonomous vehicle moral dilemmas matter less for the particular outcomes of potential accidents than for their role in defining the values of the society we wish to live in. Different approaches have been suggested to determine the ethical settings that autonomous vehicles should be implemented in and identify the legitimate agents for making such decisions. Most of these, however, fail on theoretical grounds, facing severe issues related to moral justifications and compliance to the law, or on practical grounds, being insufficiently universal, action-guiding, or technically viable to be implemented. The analogy with the “trolley problem” has been extensively discussed. However, researchers have rarely tried to adapt this framework to autonomous vehicle cases or investigate how it could be used to address these issues. In doing so, this paper aims to answer the two key problems of autonomous vehicle dilemmas. With regards to the decision-maker, it rejects autonomous vehicle users’ choice-based models, showing the absurdity of both switch of control and adaptative preferences and arguing for common legislator-determined ethical settings. With regards to the decisions themselves, it criticizes both utilitarian views and those based on individuals’ criteria to suggest a deontologist rights-based approach. This allows for the defence of a morally coherent, regulatory compliant, explainable, and easily implementable framework capable of addressing all autonomous vehicle moral dilemma scenarios present in the literature.

Cognitive architectures for artificial intelligence ethics

As artificial intelligence (AI) thrives and propagates through modern life, a key question to ask is how to include humans in future AI? Despite human involvement at every stage of the production process from conception and design through to implementation, modern AI is still often criticized for its “black box” characteristics. Sometimes, we do not know what really goes on inside or how and why certain conclusions are met. Future AI will face many dilemmas and ethical issues unforeseen by their creators beyond those commonly discussed (e.g., trolley problems and variants of it) and to which solutions cannot be hard-coded and are often still up for debate. Given the sensitivity of such social and ethical dilemmas and the implications of these for human society at large, when and if our AI make the “wrong” choice we need to understand how they got there in order to make corrections and prevent recurrences. This is particularly true in situations where human livelihoods are at stake (e.g., health, well-being, finance, law) or when major individual or household decisions are taken. Doing so requires opening up the “black box” of AI; especially as they act, interact, and adapt in a human world and how they interact with other AI in this world. In this article, we argue for the application of cognitive architectures for ethical AI. In particular, for their potential contributions to AI transparency, explainability, and accountability. We need to understand how our AI get to the solutions they do, and we should seek to do this on a deeper level in terms of the machine-equivalents of motivations, attitudes, values, and so on. The path to future AI is long and winding but it could arrive faster than we think. In order to harness the positive potential outcomes of AI for humans and society (and avoid the negatives), we need to understand AI more fully in the first place and we expect this will simultaneously contribute towards greater understanding of their human counterparts also.

Influence of negative mood states on moral decision-making

Utilitarian behaviours sometimes require harmful actions be performed to benefit the perceived ‘greater good’. Humans are often averse to such actions when they involve inflicting direct harm upon others, regardless of the positive outcomes that are achieved. Predominant theory proposes that anti-utilitarian biases stem from negative emotions evoked by moral dilemmas, which override considerations of the ‘greater good’ produced by utilitarian behaviour. This study examined associations between utilitarian judgment and common domains of negative mood. Participants ( N ​= ​73) responded to self-report measures of depression, anxiety and stress-tension, followed by a moral dilemma paradigm. The dilemmas involved a series of ethically challenging scenarios, including the canonical ‘trolley problem’. Depression scores were robustly associated with increased utilitarian responses, while no associations were identified for anxiety or stress-tension. Depression was selectively associated with utilitarianism in ‘personal’ moral dilemmas invovling emotionally-salient elements, such as directly sacrificing one life to save five. These findings suggest a preliminary link between depressive mood and utilitarian moral judgement. We discuss the nature of these findings regarding conventional theories, including the role of altered emotion in moral cognition and implications for the study of clinical mood disorders. • On average, non-utilitarian responses were preferred, especially in emotionally-salient dilemmas. • Depression was associated with utilitarian judgement in emotionally-salient moral dilemmas. • Other mood domains (anxiety, stress-tension) showed no association with moral judgement. • Age and sex were also associated with utilitarian judgement.

The role of contextual information in a virtual trolly problem: A psychophysiological investigation

ABSTRACT Trolley problems have persisted as a popular method to examine moral decision-making in the face of many criticisms. One such criticism is that thought experiments provide unrealistically abundant contextual information, leading to mental simulation. Recent work utilizing virtual reality technology has reduced contextual information with mixed results. However, this work has not departed entirely from the thought experiment tradition, often providing written or verbal descriptions of the trolley problem before or during the simulation. This approach may still allow for mental simulation prior to decision-making. The goal of the current study is to examine whether or not this criticism is relevant for the classic version of the trolley problem. One hundred and nineteen participants were randomly assigned to either receive prior contextual information about the trolley problem or receive no information. All participants then entered a virtual reality simulation of the classic trolley problem. We examined decision-making from an affective and autonomic nervous system perspective. We found no effect on any measure in response to the reduction of contextual information. There were, however, surprising gender differences in decision-making and autonomic response. Further, we discuss how these findings relate to competing dual-process models of moral decision-making.

Situational factors shape moral judgements in the trolley dilemma in Eastern, Southern and Western countries in a culturally diverse sample.

The study of moral judgements often centres on moral dilemmas in which options consistent with deontological perspectives (that is, emphasizing rules, individual rights and duties) are in conflict with options consistent with utilitarian judgements (that is, following the greater good based on consequences). Greene et al. (2009) showed that psychological and situational factors (for example, the intent of the agent or the presence of physical contact between the agent and the victim) can play an important role in moral dilemma judgements (for example, the trolley problem). Our knowledge is limited concerning both the universality of these effects outside the United States and the impact of culture on the situational and psychological factors affecting moral judgements. Thus, we empirically tested the universality of the effects of intent and personal force on moral dilemma judgements by replicating the experiments of Greene et al. in 45 countries from all inhabited continents. We found that personal force and its interaction with intention exert influence on moral judgements in the US and Western cultural clusters, replicating and expanding the original findings. Moreover, the personal force effect was present in all cultural clusters, suggesting it is culturally universal. The evidence for the cultural universality of the interaction effect was inconclusive in the Eastern and Southern cultural clusters (depending on exclusion criteria). We found no strong association between collectivism/individualism and moral dilemma judgements.

Ethical Judgments in the Trolley Dilemma and Ethical Decision-Making Levels of Nursing Students

Purpose: This study was aimed to investigate the effect of Decision-Making levels of nursing students on the ethical judgments in the Trolley Dilemma. Materials and Methods: It was carried out with 349 nursing students from the first, second, third, and fourth grades at a university's Nursing Department of the Faculty of Health Sciences during the 2020-2021 academic year. It was designed as a descriptive cross-sectional study. The data was collected online by using Trolley Dilemma scenarios and Nursing Dilemma Test. Results: The mean scores for nursing students' principled thinking (49.97±6.40) were found to be higher than the average, while the mean score for practical thinking (17.35±3.91) was close to the average. Most of the students (83.4%) responded ‘YES’ to the first trolley dilemma scenario, while 46.1% responded ‘YES’ to the second scenario. In the first trolley dilemma scenario, most students flipped a switch and saved the five workers; however, in the second scenario, more than half chose not to throw the fat man off the bridge to save five people, preferring to let five workers die instead. Female students were found to have a higher level of principled thinking, but students who had received ethics education and had previously experienced ethical dilemmas were found to be more familiar with dilemmas. Conclusions: To improve the ethical decisionmaking skills of nursing students', ethics classes should include compelling scenarios such as trolley dilemma scenarios as well as real-life scenarios, and students should be encouraged to discuss their ideas. Keywords: Nursing students; ethical dilemma, decision making; trolley dilemma

COVID-19 pandemic: the "trolley problem" to explain allocation of scarce resources

The SARS-CoV-2 virus that appeared in December2019 in the city of Wuhan in China spread rapidly. Severe forms of this virus infection cause acute respiratory distress syndromes (ARDS) requiring hospitalization of affected patients in intensive care units (IUCs), providing mechanical ventilation. The capacity of ICUs in the countries most affected by this health crisis quickly became overwhelmed, forcing healthcare providers to choose the patients who would benefit from care. Managing the overload of a healthcare system is the role of disaster medicine, forwhich one of the principles is the triage of patients according to their severity. Having to choose between patients means choosing a statement between deontology (judging the morality of an action according to its intention) and utilitarianism (judging the morality of an action by its consequences). The aims of this article are, through the analysis of the trolley problem, to understand and justify the process of allocation of scarce resources found in the guidelines used in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis of the trolley problem allows us to understand in what way our choices are utilitarian or deontological. Saving as many lives as possible", as advocated in the guidelines, isutilitarian. These answers will provide a better understanding of all of the different ways of allocating scare resources according to the deontological or utilitarian approach, especially the one found in the disaster medicine guidelines.

Fickle Judgments in Moral Dilemmas: Time Pressure and Utilitarian Judgments in an Interdependent Culture.

In the trolley problem, a well-known moral dilemma, the intuitive process is believed to increase deontological judgments, while deliberative reasoning is thought to promote utilitarian decisions. Therefore, based on the dual-process model, there seems to be an attempt to save several lives at the expense of a few others in a deliberative manner. This study examines the validity of this argument. To this end, we manipulate decision-making time in the standard trolley dilemma to compare differences among 119 Japanese female undergraduates under three conditions: intuitive judgment, deliberative judgment, and judgment after a group discussion. The current results demonstrate that utilitarian judgments decreased from 52.9% in the intuition condition to 43.7% in the deliberation condition and 37.0% after the discussion. Additional analysis suggests that the decrease in utilitarian judgments may be related to psychological unwillingness to assume responsibility for the lives of others rather than to an increase in deontological judgments. Finally, these results are discussed from an adaptationist perspective.

Lessons from the Nickel Plate Road, 1881 to 1916: A railroad built to be sold

This study examines the operation of the New York, Chicago & St Louis Railroad Company, which is better known by the name, the Nickel Plate Road (NKP). The operations and financial reports from its inception through the period under study provide evidence that management adopted practices that contributed to a populist view of behaviour akin to the robber baron image. This added to social disruption, and the need for anti-trust regulation. Monopolistic tendencies of U.S. large-scale enterprises in the last decades of the nineteenth century motivated speculative investors to build the NKP for selling it to ensure anti-competitive aims of the acquirer. This article, based on the annual accounting reports, asserts that enabling such a structure guided NKP's activities. This demonstrates that laissez-faire business policy alone was failing to meet developing social constructs for an industrial society. Disclosure of accounting numbers became an expectation with the rise of the Interstate Commerce Commission and regulation demonstrating the public use of private interest. Regulating the socio-economic force of railroads and addressing the ‘railroad problem’ would require decades for government officials to effectively address.

The Radicalization of Brexit Activists.

Brexit activists demonstrating outside the British Houses of Parliament were studied in situ to examine their potential for pro-group extreme behavior. This involved activists of two polarized, opposing views; those of Leave and Remain. The research engaged concepts linking the different theoretical perspectives of identity fusion and personal construct psychology. The study measured participants' degree of fusion to their group using a verbal measure. Willingness to undertake extreme acts was assessed in several ways: a measure of willingness to fight for the group, adaptations of the trolley dilemma and questions regarding political violence. Individual construing was examined using repertory grid technique and a semi-structured interview. Results were similar for both Leave and Remain participants. The majority of activists identified as “fused” to their group and, if so, were more likely to undertake hypothetical extreme behavior compared to those who did not identify as “fused.” Repertory grid technique indicated that becoming an activist provided individuals with a clearer and more positive view of themselves. Opposition activists were construed more negatively and extremely than fellow activists, and this construal was associated with an increased willingness to undertake extreme pro-group behavior. This was consistent with the personal construct model of radicalization and was heightened in those who were “fused.” Interview data provided support for the constructivist model and revealed characteristics and concerns of the two groups. Overall, the findings indicate that campaigning organizations contain fused individuals, who are more likely to undertake hypothetical pro-group violence including self-sacrifice. This has broader implications which may be particularly pertinent, given the violent impact of extremist activists around the globe.

Ethos of evolutionary societal complexity

Consideration of the ethos component makes it possible to give a whole range picture of the essence of social arrangement at different stages of the evolution of communities. The living elements of Western and Eastern governance traditions presented in the cases display a great variety in the configuration of the coexistence of formal institutions and informal practices, which reveals an irreducible variability of the spectrum of social complexity. Attempts to artificially unify the governance environment are based on a project vision of reality, which, when in contact with the initial conditions of reform, can lead to counterproductive results and bounce back on the personal fate of decision-makers. In this regard, the problem of the ethos of the reformer's personal responsibility in conjunction with the continuity and cyclicality of the political process becomes highly relevant. Ethos in politics fits into the gap between the individual and the public — the gap in which choice is born. This formulation of the ethos issue creates the possibility of its two-vector consideration — from top to bottom and from bottom to the top. The first vector implies a deterministic need to make a decision in a situation that is represented in the literature as a «trolley problem» — a scalable choice based on a quantitative (good for the majority) or qualitative (value of an individual fate) criterion. A prerequisite for the cognitive «trolley model» is the configuration of the situation in such a way that inaction choice is not an ethically neutral alternative: it equates to a choice that is fully amenable to normative analysis, taking into account the consequences of such a decision for an individual and / or collective subject. The second vector of studying the ethos component in politics concerns the often contradictory sequence of steps in decision-making by an individual subject who has delegated the right to govern to a collective level subject. The problems of this analytical spectrum are presented in the «principal-agent» theory (M. Pollack) and are based on the role of information asymmetries. A principal delegating managerial authority to an agent assumes that the agent has more qualifications and expertise to make decisions in favor of the principal. After the conclusion of the «social contract of delegation», the agent does not always use these information asymmetries in order to benefit the principal. The described collisions, arising in the course of evolution in the ethos component of complex societies, significantly increase the difficulties in predicting the course of development of the immediate and distant consequences of current events, thus intensifying the dependence on the sole and collective subjects of political decisionmaking.

Moral judgment, decision times and emotional salience of a new developed set of sacrificial manual driving dilemmas.

The growing interest in the subject of moral judgment in driver and autonomous vehicle behavior highlights the importance of investigating the suitability of sacrificial dilemmas as experimental tools in the context of traffic psychology. To this aim a set of validated sacrificial trolley problems and a new set of trolley-like driving dilemmas were compared through an online survey experiment, providing normative values for rates of participants’ choices; decision times; evaluation of emotional valence and arousal experienced during the decision process; and ratings of the moral acceptability. Results showed that while both sets of dilemmas led to a more frequent selection of utilitarian outcomes, the driving-type dilemmas seemed to enhance faster decisions mainly based on the utilitarian moral code. No further differences were observed between the two sets, confirming the reliability of the moral dilemma tool in the investigation of moral driving behaviors. We suggest that as moral judgments and behaviors become more lifelike, the individual’s moral inclination emerge more automatically and effectively. This new driving-type dilemma set may help researchers who work in traffic psychology and moral decision-making to approach the complex task of developing realistic moral scenarios more easily in the context of autonomous and nonautonomous transportation.

The Trolley Problem and Intuitional Evidence

The Trolley Problem and Intuitional Evidence