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Abstract
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Further discussion of the philosophical trolley dilemma concerning greater good, who to save, and who to kill.
Do hypothetical preferences predict real-life moral behavior? Bostyn, Sevenhant, and Roets (2018) conclude that there are notable discrepancies between the psychological processes underlying decisions in real-life and in hypothetical moral dilemmas, adding to recent critiques of the moral-dilemma empirical paradigm (Bauman, McGraw, Bartels, & Warren, 2014; Kahane, 2015; Kahane et al., 2018). One of their central findings is that hypothetical preferences for consequentialism were significantly correlated with consequentialist behavior when participants responded to a hypothetical dilemma (odds ratio, or OR = 2.14, z = 2.17, p = .030) but not when a separate sample of participants was presented with a real-life version of the same dilemma (OR = 1.35, z = 0.83, p = .406). Their study raises important questions about whether experiments based on hypothetical scenarios, such as trolley-style dilemmas, can be used to understand the processes underlying real-life moral behavior.
Our Commentary addresses a limitation of the analyses of Bostyn and colleagues: namely, they did not directly compare the effects of consequentialist-reasoning preferences on hypothetical and real-life moral behavior. In other words, their analyses tested whether consequentialist-reasoning preferences were associated with behavior within each sample, but they did not test whether these two effects were significantly different from each other. The strategy of focusing only on within-group analyses ...
Language: en |