If trolleyology really doesn’t address what it sets out to, what’s the alternative?
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- December 02, 2014
- CBR - Behavioral Science
If trolleyology really doesn’t address what it sets out to, what’s the alternative?
A trolley is careening down the track, and will surely crash and kill five passengers. You, an onlooker, see a switch that you can pull to reroute the trolley onto another track and save the riders—but a workman on that track will die instead. What would you do?
This “trolley” problem and its various iterations have become mainstays in the psychology of decision-making. But Chicago Booth’s Daniel Bartels, along with Christopher W. Bauman of the University of California, Irvine; Peter McGraw of the University of Colorado, Boulder; and Caleb Warren of Texas A&M University, argue “trolleyology” needs to be revamped.
Bartels and his coauthors have three objections:
If trolleyology really doesn’t address what it sets out to, what’s the alternative? Bartels and his coresearchers suggest that psychologists need to rely more on setups that are relevant to real life. “There are any number of realistic situations that researchers could study,” says Bauman. “Rather than studying trolleys, consider business managers who have to decide whom to let go during rounds of layoffs, or doctors who must decide when to continue to treat patients who have a low probability of surviving and when to use the same scarce resources to treat others. Most important, let’s study lots of moral situations rather than fixate on any one in particular. Let’s also make any situation we study as realistic and plausible as possible.”
Daniel Bartels, Christopher W. Bauman, Peter McGraw, and Caleb Warren, “Concerns about Trolley Problems and Other Sacrificial Dilemmas in Moral Psychology,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass, September 2014.
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