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Would You Kill Someone to Save Five Others? Virtual Reality Tells the Truth

A train is charging toward a group of people. You have 10 seconds to either reroute it and intentionally kill a man, or do nothing and let the group die. What do you do, for real?

You've probably pondered it before: Would you pull the trigger and end someone's life if it meant saving someone you love? What if it was a perfect stranger? What if it was five perfect strangers? And you've probably answered these hypothetical moral dilemmas something like this: "I think so, but who knows what I'd actually do in real life."

Well, virtual reality is a step closer to real life, and researchers are experimenting with the technology to get a better measure of how humans behave in an ethical pickle.

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A team from the International School for Advanced Studies found that when faced with a moral dilemma in a virtual reality scenario, people were more likely to make a practical, outcome-based choice rather than an abstract moral judgment like they would if simply pondering a hypothetical question—even though they were more emotionally charged.

Here's one of the scenarios they looked at. Say there are two sets of train tracks, one with five people walking on the track and one with just a single person. A train is charging toward the larger group, and you have 10 seconds to decide whether to reroute it and kill the lone walker, or do nothing and let the group of five die.

In text-based questionnaires—the traditional method for gauging the psychological thought process of ethical dilemmas—folks tend to search through the mental index of their ethical principles and answer accordingly. In the train scenario, that meant people were more likely to choose not to plow the single guy over because purposefully causing someone harm is a clear-cut moral no-no.

But when placed in a context-rich virtual reality environment, participants' emotions were heightened, and they were more likely to voluntarily sacrifice the man on the alternative track to save the larger group.

It makes some sense. When you have a more immediate, visceral understanding of the consequences of your actions, it's going to influence what you do. In the virtually composed situations, participants saw the bleeding corpses of human avatars lying on the track after they’d run them over with a train.

"Since participants watch somebody get harmed in a violent and gory way after making a choice, this might influence their subsequent choices, making them more sensitive to outcomes," the study explains. "When arousal is greater—in a virtual reality setting, which is closer to a real-life situation—the subjects respond in a utilitarian manner, that is, they choose to take action to save the greatest number of people.”

Frankly I find it hard to believe that anyone would choose not to just do the simple math and opt to kill as few people as possible. But the more salient point is that in the heat of the moment, people are willing to do something they believe to be immoral, if the consequences merit it—the "pain versus gain" paradigm. "In other words, people showed a tendency to choose actions they judged to be wrong,” the researchers wrote.

That has broad implications for understanding crime, war, heroism, and humans’ social instincts. The study, published this month in the journal Social Neuroscience, is the first to use a digitally constructed reality to get a better sense for how emotions influence action and behavior. It’ll be interesting to dig even deeper into virtual reality-based psychology to tackle the elusive question of why things are "easier said than done."

@meghanneal