Associate Professor of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford
Disclosure statement
Jim A.C. Everett receives funding from the US-UK Fulbright Commission, and the Economic and Social Research Council.
Molly Crockett receives funding from The Wellcome Trust, Oxford University Press and The John Templeton Foundation.
Imagine that an out of control trolley is speeding towards a
group of five people. You are standing on a footbridge above, next to a
large man. If you push him off the bridge onto the track below, his body
will stop the trolley before it hits the five people. He will die, but
the five others will be saved. Should you push the man off the bridge?
Before you make your decision, you should know that your popularity could depend on it. According to a new study of more than 2,400 participants, which we carried out with David Pizarro
from Cornell University, the way you answer the “trolley problem” can
have a big impact on how much people trust you. So let’s have a look at
your options.
You might say yes; saving five lives outweighs the harm of killing
one person. And you wouldn’t be alone: you’d be making a moral decision
in line with “consequentialist” theories of morality.
Consequentialists
believe that we should aim to maximise the greatest good for the
greatest number of people, even if this means causing some harm – for
example, by killing one person to save five.
On the other hand, you might say no; killing someone is just wrong,
regardless of any positive consequences there might be. Here, you’d be
making a moral decision in line with “deontological” moral theories,
which focus on moral rules, rights and duties. Maxims such as “thou shalt not kill” and “treat others as you would like to be treated” (otherwise known as the golden rule) fit into this category.
Which do you choose?
Statistically,
more people think that it’s wrong to push the man off the bridge to
save the five others. On one level, this makes sense – we shudder at the
thought of a friend or partner doing a cost-benefit analysis of whether
you should be sacrificed for the greater good. So why do more people
prefer this rule-based approach to morality?
Some scholars have argued
that deontological intuitions arise from “irrational” emotional
responses. But we thought there might be another explanation: namely,
the power of popularity. We proposed that if people who stick to moral
rules are considered to be better social partners, that might explain
why more people take a deontological view.
Toeing the line may come naturally.www.shutterstock.com
Over the course of human evolution, this could favour one type of
moral thinking over another among the entire population. So, rather than
reflecting irrational or emotional thinking, making moral judgements
based on rules could be an adaptive feature of our minds.
To the test
We tested this hypothesis using several variations of the “trolley
problem” and asked whether people who made deontological or
consequentialist moral judgements were preferred as social partners.
Over the course of nine experiments, we found that people who took a
deontological approach to the dilemmas (refusing to kill an innocent
person, even when this maximised the greater good) were seen as more
trustworthy than those who advocated a more flexible, consequentialist
approach.
And not only did most people say they would rather trust a
deontologist than a consequentialist – they also put their money where
their mouths were. When asked to entrust another person with a sum of
money, participants handed over more money, and were more confident of
getting it back, when dealing with someone who refused to sacrifice one
to save many, compared with someone who chose to maximise the overall
number of lives saved.
Not so simple
But this wasn’t the whole story: simply deciding whether or not to
sacrifice an innocent person was not the only thing that mattered. We
also found that how the choice was made was crucial. Someone who had
decided to sacrifice one life to save five – but had found that decision
difficult – was trusted more than someone who had found the decision
easy.
And it wasn’t always the case that those who refused to kill an
innocent person were trusted more. Where the person who might be
sacrificed indicated a specific desire to live or a willingness to die,
people favoured individuals who respected those wishes – even if that
involved killing.
These findings don’t just help explain how we came to have the moral
intuitions that we do, but also how moral judgements play out on the
world stage. Our results could help shed light on why we are often
attracted to political leaders who communicate simple messages based on
moral rules.
Consider, for example, a politician who says that gay marriage should
be legal because marriage is a fundamental right in a fair and
democratic society (a deontological perspective). This person is likely
be to seen as more moral and trustworthy than one who says that gay
marriage should be legal because it has positive economic or social
consequences (a more consequentialist perspective).
So next time you have to make a tough call, remember – people like people who follow moral rules.
