Psychology of Consciousness Summary – The Trolley Problem

On Tuesday, we reviewed a very classic thought experiment in philosophy: the trolley problem.

This problem has been studied extensively in moral psychology, and we personally experienced how different variants of this problem elicit very different reactions. We went over some of these different variants and discussed the results of a classic study in moral psychology looking at the neural basis of moral judgment.

We learned how we can answer some philosophical questions with experimental psychology and neuroscience. We continued learning about factors that influence how we make judgments of morally-relevant actions. We focused on one important factor: intent. We learned that intent matters a lot, and that people make very different judgments of harm depending on whether the harm was intentional or accidental. Specifically, people tend to judge attempted harms more harshly than accidental harms even though the outcome is worse in the case of accidental harms. We learned how people’s judgments of harm can change over time (children tend to focus more on outcomes and less on intentions), and how they can change across people (e.g., people with damage to regions involved in emotional processing tend to judge attempted harms more leniently). We also learned about neuroscience techniques that researchers can use to test the causal role of specific brain regions in moral judgments of different harmful actions.

If you’re interested in reading more about this line of work, here’s a piece for broad audiences.

Until next time,
Lily

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Lily Tsoi
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Psychology
Boston College