Psychology
Driving Over Your Best Friend: It’s the Right Thing to Do
Life is full of moral dilemmas, and a new study shows we may be better at resolving them than we think
By Jeffrey Kluger Jan. 15, 2014Add a Comment
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You’d find it easier than you think to drop a car on an unsuspecting stranger. You’d probably be able to kill a person with a runaway train too. And as for feeding a swimmer to a school of sharks? No problem. And you know what? There’s not a thing wrong with any of that—depending on the circumstances.
Psychologists and philosophers have long recognized that morality can be a slippery, highly context-dependent concept. Is smothering a crying baby a bad thing? Um, yes. Now suppose you’re part of a group of adults and children hiding in an attic from an armed madman and the baby would give you away—guaranteeing that you’d all be killed. Could you murder one person—albeit a tiny, helpless one—to save 20?
Literature on human behavior is filled with these so-called moral dilemmas: scenarios that force subjects to take some affirmative step to prevent harm to a lot of people while deliberately inflicting it on at least one other. In many cases, that unfortunate other is a best friend or even a family member. The problem with all of the studies is that they’re hypothetical—and well they might be. You can hardly smother a real baby or conduct a real scenario in which a runaway trolley is heading for five pedestrians and you have the power to switch the tracks so that it runs over just one. That means investigators are left with nothing more to work with than detached subjects contemplating imaginary situations and answering—on paper or on a computer screen—how they think they would react. Hardly real-time science. But a new study, just published in Social Neuroscience, has come up with a way to enliven things a little, at last giving subjects a sense that they’re playing for higher than hypothetical stakes.
Read more: Morality: When Driving Over Your Friend is the Right Thing to Do | TIME.com http://science.time.com/2014/01/15/driving-over-your-best-friend-its-the-right-thing-to-do/#ixzz2qxNxsPfy
Driving Over Your Best Friend: It’s the Right Thing to Do
Life is full of moral dilemmas, and a new study shows we may be better at resolving them than we think
By Jeffrey Kluger Jan. 15, 2014Add a Comment
inShare
2
Read Later
Email Print Share Comment
Follow @TIME
You’d find it easier than you think to drop a car on an unsuspecting stranger. You’d probably be able to kill a person with a runaway train too. And as for feeding a swimmer to a school of sharks? No problem. And you know what? There’s not a thing wrong with any of that—depending on the circumstances.
Psychologists and philosophers have long recognized that morality can be a slippery, highly context-dependent concept. Is smothering a crying baby a bad thing? Um, yes. Now suppose you’re part of a group of adults and children hiding in an attic from an armed madman and the baby would give you away—guaranteeing that you’d all be killed. Could you murder one person—albeit a tiny, helpless one—to save 20?
Literature on human behavior is filled with these so-called moral dilemmas: scenarios that force subjects to take some affirmative step to prevent harm to a lot of people while deliberately inflicting it on at least one other. In many cases, that unfortunate other is a best friend or even a family member. The problem with all of the studies is that they’re hypothetical—and well they might be. You can hardly smother a real baby or conduct a real scenario in which a runaway trolley is heading for five pedestrians and you have the power to switch the tracks so that it runs over just one. That means investigators are left with nothing more to work with than detached subjects contemplating imaginary situations and answering—on paper or on a computer screen—how they think they would react. Hardly real-time science. But a new study, just published in Social Neuroscience, has come up with a way to enliven things a little, at last giving subjects a sense that they’re playing for higher than hypothetical stakes.
Read more: Morality: When Driving Over Your Friend is the Right Thing to Do | TIME.com http://science.time.com/2014/01/15/driving-over-your-best-friend-its-the-right-thing-to-do/#ixzz2qxNxsPfy
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