{"pk":25823,"title":"When killing the heavy man seems right\nMaking people utilitarian by simply adding options to moral dilemmas","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Trolley dilemmas are widely used to elicit moral intuitions.\nMost people do not think it would be morally right to push\na heavy man from a bridge, thereby killing him, in order to\navoid the death of several other people. Here we\nempirically tested a prediction by Unger (1996) who claims\nthat adding more options to this scenario would shift\npeople’s intuition from the normally preferred option of\ndoing nothing to the utilitarian option of killing the heavy\nman. While not finding significant results with Unger’s\noriginal materials, an experiment with adapted materials\nconfirmed the assumption that pushing one person is more\nlikely to be preferred to not intervening if certain additional\noptions are provided. Moreover, we found that moral\nintuitions are transferred from several-option cases to twooption\ncases (and the other way around). We discuss some\npossible psychological explanations for and normative\nimplications of these findings","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"moral judgment; trolley dilemmas;\nutilitarianism; several-option cases; framing effects"},{"word":"transfer effects"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/13b796v3","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Alex","middle_name":"","last_name":"Wiegmann","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Göttingen","department":""},{"first_name":"Karina","middle_name":"","last_name":"Meyer","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Göttingen","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25823/galley/15447/download/"}]}