siiky
2022/11/20
2022/11/20
en
Today I watched S02E01 of Mind Field, "The Greater Good". It's about people's ability to act on a real situation where they have to choose between two groups of people which should be sacrificed over the other, and it's based on a thought experiment: the trolley problem.
This post is in part about the thought experiment itself, and in part about the Mind Field episode.
It seems there's been no previous empirical research on it, and Michael (the host aka Vsauce) intends on making it happen. As preparation, he interviewed Dr. Aaron Blaisdell (~4:10), a psychology professor of the UCLA Psychology Department, according to whom research shows that "most people say they would pull the switch". However, Dr. Aaron believed most people would freeze instead of pulling the switch in a real situation.
Before I go into the episode I want to comment on this section on the Wikipedia page with criticism to the thought experiment.
In a 2014 paper published in the Social and Personality Psychology Compass, researchers criticized the use of the trolley problem, arguing, among other things, that the scenario it presents is too extreme and unconnected to real-life moral situations to be useful or educational.
Imagine a person being forced to go to war and kill "enemies" because such is the way of the world -- is that scenario also "too extreme and unconnected to real-life moral situations to be useful or educational"?
Brianna Rennix and Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs go even further and assert that the thought experiment is not only useless, but also downright detrimental to human psychology. The authors opine that to make cold calculations about hypothetical situations in which every alternative will result in one or more gruesome deaths is to encourage a type of thinking that is devoid of human empathy and assumes a mandate to decide who lives or dies.
How does it encourage anything? It's only a thought experiment. Different theories/philosophies have different methods of deciding which is the right action to take, but the thought experiment itself is only used to "exercise" these methods. Add some details here or there and you get several different scenarios to think about. A popular variation is that of the baby: instead of a single person on the other track, there's a baby. Another possible variation would be to assume that the people on the tracks are family/friends; or to assume that the five people are family/friends and the other a stranger; or to assume that the five people are strangers and the other family/a friend; ... If you don't like the original "plain" scenario then think of something else. However, each variation exercises slightly differently your theory/philosophy.
And what if it assumes? That's a pre-requisite of a thought experiment: you assume a certain situation, and you think about it.
If I am forced against my will into a situation where people will die, and I have no ability to stop it, how is my choice a "moral" choice between meaningfully different options, as opposed to a horror show I've just been thrust into, in which I have no meaningful agency at all?
The "meaningful agency" is choosing who to let live. Being forced or not has nothing to do with your role. Surely, if there are two possible future situations, and one may be considered through some criteria to be better than the other, then acting towards the better situation is the moral choice.
Michael's intention was to put people in an actually credible situation where they believe they have to choose between two groups of people which is to be saved and which is to be sacrificed.
Since the intention was not to traumatize any participants, they (I assume Michael, Dr. Aaron, and Dr. Greg Cason who shows up some minutes later) developed a screening process to filter out more psychologically "fragile" persons (my wording). For example, they would exclude people more prone to depression, or people already suffering from some sort of trauma, &c. Only people that can reasonably go through the traumatizing situation and recover from it, given that it wasn't real, are accepted.
My comment is on this point alone: doesn't this segregation create a bias in the experiment? It's possible that, in average, people of the different "groups" would act differently in the same situations. Thus running the experiment only on the "non-fragile" means getting biased results.
This is criticism in the sense of being critical, not in the sense of being "wrong". I understand that they don't want to intentionally put random people they find on the street in traumatizing situations For Science. It's definitely a grey area and I can't say I'm for one way or the other. Personally I think it would be awesome to be a part of this experiment, I'd like to know what I would actually do in that scenario.
It was very interesting to see how the subjects reacted and what their final action (or non-action) was.
If you don't intend on watching and/or don't mind spoilers, keep reading.
They recorded workers on the tracks, just standing there looking distracted. They also recorded a train going through both tracks, one and then the other. With some video editing they merged the recordings of the workers and of the train, so that it looked like the train was really going in the workers' direction. The subjects had a few screens playing those recordings of the tracks and after a short while with nothing happening the train appeared.
But the group was so small... Seven people! This is my only other criticism of the experiment. Seven people is not a large enough sample to be significant.
All of them without exception were very clearly and visibly perturbed by the experience.
And these were the results: two switched and five didn't. The two that did switch were even more perturbed while and right after switching. The first had their hands shaking. And the second started crying while reflecting on it, after they'd already been told it was only an experiment!
The most affected of all was the second to switch, the one who started crying. They said they thought of the families of both groups of people and all. Must have been their trigger.
The ones that didn't switch gave reasons such as that they expected the workers to eventually notice the train; they expected the train to have sensors and that the train would eventually stop before hitting anyone; they were really terrified and couldn't act.