Some researchers introduce race into the "trolley problem" moral dilemma

[mattbell]

The classic trolley problem, in which you have to decide whether to take an action that will save some number of people but kill a smaller number of people, has now been tried with race mixed in.

As it turns out, race is a factor in trolley problems, but not in the way you might think.  Read about the study here.  On average, political conservatives are more likely to sacrifice minorities, while liberals are more likely to sacrifice whites.  Of course, this whole political conservative/liberal one-dimensional axis is a gross oversimplification... I'd be interested to see what specific moral beliefs it lines up with.  I'm guessing that people with more in-group bias and more xenophobia are more likely to sacrifice someone of a different race. 

Side note:  Haidt's research on moral underpinnings of liberal vs conservative ideologies is interesting.

Comments

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

I was wondering the same thing, until I read the actual article. According to Wired:

"If you’re wondering whether this is just because conservatives are racist—well, it may well be that conservatives are more racist. But it appears in these studies that the effect is driven [primarily] by liberals saying that they’re more likely to agree with pushing the white man and [more likely to] disagree with pushing the black man.

So we used to refer to this as the “kill whitey” study."

I don't know how much I trust Wired to report scientific studies though. I can't seem to find out a mention of how they (or whether they) controlled for race in this study. There are more white conservatives and more black liberals, so if you didn't control for it at all, and everyone was a bit racist (biased toward their own race) then you'd automatically get this effect. I'm assuming somehow they tried to control for this, but the question is how?

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I would have liked it if they broke it down by race within each political affiliation. As it stands there are many possible interpretations.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

Reading the article told me what the article's author thinks - not what nasu_dengaku thinks :)