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BEYOND PHYSICAL HARM 1
Beyond Physical Harm: How Preference for Consequentialism and Primary Psychopathy
Relate to Decisions on a Monetary Trolley Dilemma
Dries H. Bostyn, Sybren Sevenhant, & Arne Roets
Ghent University; Department of Developmental, Personality, and Social Psychology; Henri
Dunantlaan 2, B-9000, Ghent, Belgium.
[email protected], ORCid: 0000-0001-9994-4615
[email protected], ORCid: 0000-0001-5814-1189
WORD COUNT: 5722
Authors’ Note
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dries H. Bostyn,
Department of Developmental, Personality, and Social Psychology, Henri Dunantlaan 2, B-
9000, Ghent, Belgium. E-mail: [email protected].
BEYOND PHYSICAL HARM 2
Abstract
When is it appropriate to harm a single person to help multiple others? Psychologists have
investigated this question through the study of hypothetical “trolley” dilemmas involving
extreme physical harm life-or-death situations that contrast outcome-focused, consequentialist
moral reasoning with principle-focused, deontological moral reasoning. The present studies
investigate whether participants’ preference for consequentialism generalizes across domains.
We administered traditional physical harm dilemmas as well as a trolley-type dilemma
involving monetary harm. Across four studies (N = 809), an internal meta-analysis
demonstrated that participants’ responses to the traditional dilemmas predicted their responses
to the monetary dilemma. Additionally, previous research has uncovered that primary
psychopathy predicts consequentialist responses on physical harm dilemmas. The current
work uncovers that this association does not generalize to monetary harm dilemmas,
suggesting that the association between primary psychopathy and consequentialist reasoning
is not related to consequentialist reasoning per se, but to the idiosyncrasies of traditional
harm-centric trolley dilemmas instead.
Keywords: Consequentialism; Utilitarianism; Psychopathy; Trolley Dilemmas; Moral
Reasoning
BEYOND PHYSICAL HARM 3
During the past fifteen years, moral psychologists have used imaginative moral
dilemmas to probe people’s moral intuitions (for an overview, see Cushman & Greene, 2012).
Although many variants of these so-called “trolley” dilemmas exist, they all share a common
core: On each dilemma, participants are asked whether it is morally appropriate to
deliberately cause serious physical harm or even death to a single individual to ensure that
equal physical harm to the many is averted (Foot, 1967). For instance, in the basic version of
the dilemma, participants are asked whether it is appropriate to deliberately divert a runaway
trolley so that it will hit and kill only a single bystander and not an entire group of five others.
These trolley dilemmas aim to contrast two different perspectives on the central question of
normative ethics: What ought we to do (Kant, 1956)? Consequentialists argue that this
question can be answered by looking at the potential outcomes of our actions (Bentham,
1983). Actions that lead to an overall better world are the ones that should be broadly labelled
as “good”. Moral reasoning, according to the consequentialist, is tantamount to figuring out
which actions maximize overall well-being or minimize overall harm. Deontologists, on the
other hand, argue that each action has a moral quality in and of itself that is independent of its
outcomes but is instead guided by a principled system of values, rights and duties (Alexander
& Moore, 2008). In the mind of a deontologist, killing can never be a “good” act, even when
it serves to avert a greater harm. In the context of trolley dilemmas, consequentialists thus
propose the better action is the one that minimizes overall harm (i.e., forfeit the life of a single
bystander for the sake of the group) whereas deontologists contend that each person has an
immaterial right to life and thus that committing an active murder is immoral, even in the
context of “the greater good”.
Each of the two options in the trolley dilemma corresponds with a different ethical
perspective and therefore, some moral psychologists have assumed that responses to these
kinds of dilemmas can serve to measure participants’ generalized preference for either of
BEYOND PHYSICAL HARM 4
these two ethical philosophies (Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001;
Greene, 2015; Kahane, 2015; Kahane, Wiech, Shackel, Farias, Savulescu, & Tracey, 2012).
However, beyond its face validity, there is little to no direct empirical evidence to support this
assumption. Trolley dilemmas have typically involved extreme life-or-death situations that the
average participant has no prior experience with. They require participants to respond to
purely hypothetical scenarios and make decisions that have, for obvious reasons, no actual
real life consequences. It is not clear to what extent participants can actually gauge the
dramatic weight of each of the two moral choices presented in these dilemmas, nor is it clear
whether the judgment they reach in these hypothetical dilemmas is related to what they would
do in a real-life dilemma situation (Bostyn, Sevenhant, & Roets, 2018). Yet studies involving
participants’ responses to these extreme physical harm trolley dilemmas are used throughout
moral psychology to draw conclusions about human moral cognition in general.
Beyond mere historical happenstance, there is no compelling reason why trolley
dilemmas should involve this type of extreme physical harm scenarios. If indeed participants’
responses are indicative of a general preference for a certain type of moral cognition
(outcome-focused versus principled) it should not matter whether these dilemmas involve life-
threatening situations or other forms of harms. Indeed, recently, some researchers have
expanded the scope of these trolley-style moral dilemmas to include less extreme versions of
physical harm such as bodily injury or dismemberment (Gold, Pulford, Colman, 2013;
Trémolière, & De Neys, 2013), dilemmas that have focused on property damage (Millar,
Turri, & Friedman, 2014; Millar, Starmans, Fugelsang, & Friedman, 2016), or versions that
were centered on monetary harm (Gold, Colman, & Pulford, 2014). These studies have
primarily focused on whether small changes in the scenario effect shifts in moral preference
for extreme harm and other types of harm alike. For instance, people typically tend to judge
sacrificial harm that is committed in an indirect manner (for instance, by pressing a switch) to
BEYOND PHYSICAL HARM 5
be more acceptable than sacrificial harm committed in an up close and personal manner
(Greene, Cushman, Stewart, Lowenberg, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2009); a distinction that appears
to generalize across moral domains (Gold et al., 2013). Similarly, DeScioli, Asao, & Kurzban
(2012) found that people tend to judge actions leading to moral violations as more wrong than
omissions of actions leading to the same violation independent of whether said moral
violation was related to harm, sexuality, property or group loyalty. Interestingly however,
while these studies have expanded the scope of trolley dilemma research, we are not aware of
any study that has directly investigated whether participants’ responses to extreme harm
trolley dilemmas predict their responses on trolley dilemmas involving other types of harms;
i.e. whether there is a general preference for consequentialist moral reasoning that spans
across multiple moral domains.
This issue also speaks to another controversy in moral psychology. A recent line of
research has uncovered that a robust predictor of consequentialist moral choice appears to be
“anti-social personality”. Machiavellianism, narcissism and sub-clinical psychopathy all
reliably predict participants’ preference for consequentialist responses on extreme harm
trolley dilemmas (Glenn, Holeva, Iyer, & Ditto, 2010; Bartels & Pizarro, 2011; Koenigs,
Kruepke, Zeier, & Newman, 2012). Furthermore, anti-social participants do not seem to act
consequentialist because of a higher interest in the greater good, but because they have a
diminished response to actively harming others (Djeriouat, & Trémolière, 2014). This
observation is not only curious, it also seems to detract from the paradigm because it suggests
that consequentialist moral choice itself is not in fact related to a genuine concern for others,
but might instead be driven by an ethical defect: the inability to empathize with the sacrificial
victim (Wiech, Kahane, Shackel, Farias, Savulescu, & Tracey, 2013). As such, some
researchers have advanced that the trolley paradigm does not investigate consequentialist or
deontological moral reasoning, but is little more than a convoluted way to measure the extent
BEYOND PHYSICAL HARM 6
with which participants are willing to harm innocent others (Kahane, Everett, Earp, Farias, &
Savulescu, 2015).
We suggest that the near exclusive use of the traditional, extreme physical harm
dilemmas and their hypothetical nature might be an underlying cause for the aforementioned
associations that have been uncovered between consequentialist moral choice and anti-social
personality traits. Indeed, recent work by Bostyn, et al. (2018) has uncovered that primary
psychopathy is unrelated to the decisions people make in a real-life trolley dilemma. Previous
research has also shown that anti-social personality is associated with mentalizing issues and
theory of mind deficits, especially in terms of the empathic understanding of others (Ali,
Chamorro-Premuzic, 2010; Wai & Tiliopoulos, 2012; Vonk, Zeigler-Hill, Ewing, Mercer, &
Noser, 2015). While this is speculative, we argue that the unrealistic and exorbitant setting of
the traditional, hypothetical trolley dilemmas may actually exacerbate this problem, thus
biasing anti-social participants towards consequentialist moral decisions; not because
consequentialist choice is driven by anti-social personality, but because the nature of
traditional trolley dilemmas hinders an already difficult empathizing process.
The present studies
In a set of four studies, we directly link participants’ responses in traditional extreme
harm hypothetical trolley dilemmas to a trolley dilemma variant involving monetary harm in a
more realistic context. On this monetary trolley dilemma, participants had to decide whether
they wanted to take away some money from one fellow participant to ensure that five others
received an additional bonus. As such, this dilemma directly mimics the structure of
traditional trolley dilemmas but clearly does not involve a life-or-death decision. This allows
us to directly compare participants’ preference for consequentialist moral reasoning across
two moral domains (i.e., hypothetical, extreme physical harm, versus more realistic, monetary
harm), and test whether responses are consistent across domains.
BEYOND PHYSICAL HARM 7
Additionally, we asked participants to fill out individual difference measures,
including most crucially, primary psychopathy. Primary psychopathy assesses “a selfish,
uncaring, and manipulative posture towards others” and can be distinguished from Secondary
psychopathy which assesses “impulsivity and a self-defeating life style” (p. 152; Levenson,
Kiehl, & Fitzpatrick, 1995). As such, we also investigated whether the association between
this measure of anti-social personality and preference for consequentialist moral choice
generalizes across moral domains or, whether it is, as we hypothesized, related to the specific
features of physical harm trolley research.
Materials and Methods
Participants
We conducted four similar studies, each in a two wave format. Participants were
recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk and paid US$0.40 for their participation in the
first and US$0.60 for their participation in the second wave of the study. All participants
received an invitation to participate in the second wave, one week after their participation in
the first. If participants did not immediately complete the second wave, they received up to
three reminders, each interspaced with a week.
An a priori power analysis determined that a sample of 190 participants is sufficient to
have approximately ~80% chance of finding a statistically significant association, assuming a
small effect at population level of r = .20. Anticipating some drop-out, we aimed for 200
participants for the first wave in each study. Demographical statistics and sample sizes for
each wave of the four studies are displayed in Table 1. Dropout was higher than we
anticipated, thereby slightly reducing the actual power of the individual studies. However, our
conclusions will be drawn based on an internal meta-analysis across the four studies, and as
such the combined power of all four studies is more than sufficient.
Insert Table 1about here
BEYOND PHYSICAL HARM 8
Procedure
Each study followed the same two-wave procedure. In the first wave, participants
completed a traditional moral dilemma battery and a short questionnaire including a measure
of primary psychopathy.1 To ensure that participants would not be primed by their responses
to the traditional trolley dilemmas, the monetary trolley dilemma was administered during the
second wave of data-collection. All materials, data and statistical code is available at
https://osf.io/u6x9r/
Measures
Traditional Moral Dilemma battery. Participants in all four studies completed the
same battery of ten moral dilemmas (Bostyn & Roets, 2017). On each trial of Studies 1 and 3,
participants were presented with a trolley dilemma and then asked to indicate the
appropriateness of the consequentialist and separately, the deontological option using a 5-
point scale going from “Absolutely inappropriate” (1) to “Absolutely appropriate” (5), to
measure their preference for consequentialist and deontological reasoning respectively. In
Studies 2 and 4, a slightly different response format was presented with participants being
asked to indicate whether they would undertake the action required to achieve the
consequentialist outcome using a 5-point scale going from “Definitely would not” (1) to
“Definitely would” (5). In other words, whereas Studies 1 and 3 measured participants’
judgment on moral appropriateness, Studies 2 and 4 measured an intention towards
consequentialist action. As both measures are frequently used in the literature, we used both to
ensure broad generalizability of our results (however, for a critical discussion of using these
particular response formats, see Kahane & Shackel, 2010).1 Four additional individual difference measures were included: need for cognition, empathic concern,
perspective taking, and moral identity. Though we only focus on the key variable psychopathy in this manuscript, a full analysis of the data is available through the supplementary materials on OSF. Perhaps most importantly: results for empathic concern mirrored those of primary psychopathy. Crucially, controlling for primary psychopathy eliminated the relationship of empathic concern with the outcome measures. Neither need for cognition, perspective taking, or moral identity showed any consistent effects.
BEYOND PHYSICAL HARM 9
Primary psychopathy. As a general measure for subclinical anti-social tendencies we
used the Primary psychopathy scale (Levenson et al., 1995). Participants were asked to
indicate their agreement on 16 statements, such as “For me, what’s right is whatever I can get
away with.” using a 4-point scale ranging from “Disagree strongly” (1) to “Agree strongly”
(4).
Monetary trolley dilemma. In all studies, participants were told that we wanted to
reward some of them with a bonus and that the main goal of the second wave was to allocate
these bonuses. Participants were told that they had been divided into subgroups of seven
people each and that a computer algorithm had randomly selected two participants from each
group. All participants were told that the two randomly selected participants would earn a
total of US$0.60 whereas the other five would only earn US$0.20. In all studies, each
participant was told that they had been selected as one of the lucky two who would receive the
US$0.60. Furthermore, we told them that they specifically had been additionally selected to
make one more choice: if they wanted to, they could override the selection process, and take
the extra US$0.40 from the other randomly selected participant to ensure that each of the
other five participants would receive the additional US$0.40. Like the traditional trolley
dilemma, this monetary trolley dilemma contrasts a consequentialist option (forfeit the bonus
of a single victim to maximize the total welfare) with a deontological option.
We used two slightly different versions of the same monetary trolley dilemma across
the four studies. In Studies 1 and 2, the US$0.40 difference was framed as a loss for the five
participants that were not selected, whereas in Studies 3 and 4 this was framed as an
additional bonus for the two selected participants. This led to a subtle difference in study
design across these studies, as in Studies 1 and 2 participants had to actively “harm” the other
selected participant (take away US$0.40) to ensure the five others wouldn’t lose the US$0.40,
whereas on Studies 3 and 4 they had to decide if they wanted to prevent the other selected
BEYOND PHYSICAL HARM 10
participant from receiving a bonus to ensure an increased bonus for the other five participants.
Importantly, participants were assured that their decision would not impact their own bonus.
The decisions participants made did not actually impact what other participants
received, as this part of each study was misdirection: All participants earned the full US$0.60
for completing the second wave. The verbatim text displayed to the participants is also
available on the study’s OSF page.
Results
Preliminary analyses
Reliabilities for all measures were satisfactory (all Cronbach α > .81). Because not all
participants returned for the second wave of our study, we tested for each study whether
dropout was related to any of the measures included in the studies. These analyses
demonstrated that dropout was not significantly related to any of the measures used in our
analyses (p-values between .066 and .935) except for age, which was significantly related to
drop-out in two of the four studies (p = .012, .048, .130, and .095, respectively). Framing the
monetary dilemma as either a “bonus” or a “loss” was unrelated to the proportion of
consequentialist decisions on that dilemma (49%, 51%, 40%, 53% for Studies 1 to 4
respectively), z = 1.04, p = .322.
Main analyses
We analyzed the data from all four studies from a meta-analytical perspective. To
ensure that we appropriately controlled for between-study heterogeneity, we conducted an
Individual Participant Data Meta-analysis (or IPD meta-analysis) for each of our research
questions. We used a random-effects mixed modelling approach with a generic factor for
“Study” as a random-effect and included random slopes for the main predictors whenever
appropriate (Bates, Kliegl, Vasisth, Baayen, 2015). IPD meta-analysis is considered to be the
gold standard approach to evidence synthesis (Stewart, Altman, Askie, Duley, Simmonds, &
BEYOND PHYSICAL HARM 11
Stewart, 2012), and allows us to explicitly model potential differences in effect size between
different studies to see if a general effect remains once we control for between study variance
in effect size, while still maintaining the information of each individual participant.
Importantly, previous research has demonstrated that participants’ age and gender
substantially impact responses on trolley dilemmas (Armstrong, Friesdorf, & Conway, 2018;
Hannikainen, Machery, & Cushman, 2018). Furthermore, both of these variables are also
related to primary psychopathy (Levenson, et al., 1995). In our samples, this appeared to be
the case as well: men were more likely to make consequentialist decisions on the monetary
trolley dilemma, OR = 1.52, z = 2.62, p = .008, had a higher preference for consequentialist
moral reasoning as measured through the traditional trolley dilemma battery, b = 0.19, se =
0.06, t(805.53) = 3.03, p = .003, and additionally scored higher on the primary psychopathy
measure, b = 0.29, se = 0.04, t(806) = 7.61, p < .001. Conversely, participants’ age was
negatively related to their likelihood of consequentialist judgment on the monetary trolley
dilemma, OR = 0.99, z = -2.09, p = .037, to their preference for consequentialist moral
reasoning on the traditional trolley dilemma battery, b = -0.07, se = 0.00, t(805.10) = -6.93, p
< .001, and to scores on primary psychopathy, b = -0.13, se = 0.00, t(806) = -8.96, p < .001.
Given the nature of these relationships we considered it important to control our main
analyses for these demographical measures.
For our main analyses, we first tested whether participants’ responses to the traditional
trolley dilemmas predicted their decision on the monetary trolley dilemma. Subsequently, we
tested whether primary psychopathy predicted participants’ responses to the traditional trolley
dilemmas and finally, we tested whether primary psychopathy predicted participants’
decisions on the monetary trolley dilemma.
We found that participants’ likelihood of making a (binary) consequentialist decision
on the monetary dilemma was significantly associated with the measures for consequentialist
BEYOND PHYSICAL HARM 12
moral preference based on the traditional trolley dilemma battery, OR = 1.53, z = 4.47, p
< .001. Furthermore, confirming the results of earlier studies, we found a clear linear
association between measures for consequentialist moral preference based on the traditional
trolley dilemma battery and participants’ levels of primary psychopathy, std. β = .14, t(76.3) =
3.60, p < .001. Crucially, however, participants’ levels of primary psychopathy did not appear
to be associated with participants’ odds of making a (binary) consequentialist decision on the
monetary trolley dilemma OR = 1.20, z = 1.24, p = .217.
Results did vary somewhat across the different studies suggesting that differences in
study design might have moderated these effects (see Table 2). Our four studies differed in
two regards: whether the monetary dilemma was framed as a loss (Studies 1 and 2) or a bonus
(Studies 3 and 4) and whether we asked participants to respond to the traditional trolley
dilemma on a moral appropriateness scale (Studies 1 and 3) or whether they were asked to
rate their intent of consequentialist action (Studies 2 and 4). We combined the data of all four
studies into a single sample to explicitly test if “Framing of Monetary Dilemma”, “Response
Format for Traditional dilemmas”, or the interaction of these two factors moderated any of the
relationships studied in the current manuscript. Crucially, none of these moderation analyses
demonstrated a significant moderation of any of the three relationships (all p > .217) nor did
any of these analyses lead to a qualitative change in the significance of any of the effects we
report. In other words, despite some variation in the significance of the results across all
studies, these results were not moderated by either the framing of the monetary dilemma (as a
loss or as a bonus), the response format for the traditional trolley dilemmas (rating moral
appropriateness vs. intent of consequentialist action), or the interaction of these two factors
thus corroborating the results from the meta-analyses.
Finally, we want to point out that repeating our main analyses without the
demographical controls (i.e., gender and age) yielded similar results, with one exception.
BEYOND PHYSICAL HARM 13
Whereas we did not find a statistically significant association of primary psychopathy with
responses to the monetary trolley dilemma when controlling for the demographical variables,
an analysis without these controls showed a significant association, OR = 1.38, z = 2.33, p
= .020. However, we believe this result is potentially misleading, because previous research
has demonstrated the substantial impact of gender and age on responses to trolley dilemmas
as well as on primary psychopathy. Hence not controlling for these variables may lead to
unwarranted interpretations of potentially spurious relationships. Indeed, in our studies,
including gender and age as control variables substantially diminishes the strength of the
association of primary psychopathy with consequentialist preference in all dilemma types (i.e.
with the traditional physical harm dilemmas, and with the monetary trolley dilemma).
However, even after controlling, a clear and significant relationship remains for the
hypothetical harm dilemmas, whereas this the association becomes non-significant for the
monetary dilemmas (see above). We argue that the substantial impact of gender and age on
both psychopathy and dilemma responses established in previous research, is a compelling
reason to include these controls when investigating the link between psychopathy and
consequentialist judgment, and we hence caution against interpreting analyses without these
controls.
Insert Table 2 About Here
Discussion
The current manuscript investigated to what extent participants’ preference for
consequentialism in the moral domain of physical harm is predictive of their preference for
consequentialism in the domain of monetary harms. Additionally, we investigated whether the
association between primary psychopathy and preference for consequentialism generalized to
the domain of monetary harms. The results from our IPD meta-analyses demonstrated that
BEYOND PHYSICAL HARM 14
people’s responses to traditional harm-centric trolley dilemmas are indeed related to their
decisions on a monetary trolley dilemma, which extends previous studies that have uncovered
other similarities in moral judgments across different domains (Gold et al., 2013; DeScioli et
al., 2012). Furthermore, we replicated earlier research (Bartels & Pizarro, 2011; Koenigs, et
al., 2012) that found that participants’ levels of primary psychopathy predicted their
consequentialist preference on traditional trolley dilemmas involving extreme physical harm.
However, despite the generalizability of participants’ preference for consequentialist judgment
across domains, primary psychopathy was unrelated to the likelihood of consequentialist
choice in the more realistic trolley dilemma that involved monetary harm.
It should be noted that the results of the internal meta-analyses did not replicate
perfectly in each of our individual studies. However, the internal meta-analyses and the
additional moderation analyses provide a more powerful and more valid test of our
hypotheses. These analyses clearly confirm this overall pattern of results and did not suggest a
problematic degree of inter-study heterogeneity. Therefore, a focus on the apparent
differences between individual study results would be misleading.
Intra-individual consistency on trolley dilemmas
Our findings are especially interesting against the backdrop of the recent criticism of
the trolley dilemma paradigm. Recently, some researchers have argued that the labels
‘consequentialist’ and ‘deontological’ are a poor descriptor for participants’ choices on trolley-
type moral dilemmas (Kahane, 2015). This controversy is largely related to the question about
what drives intra-individual consistency in participants’ responses to trolley dilemmas. Some
research has suggested that what we label as ‘preference for consequentialist moral reasoning’
might be driven by egoistic or anti-social tendencies (Kahane et al, 2015; Bartels & Pizarro,
2011). If indeed participants’ consistency across multiple moral dilemmas could be fully
explained by their overall level of anti-social personality, trolley dilemma research would
BEYOND PHYSICAL HARM 15
constitute little more than a convoluted way to study harm aversion. However, the current
study offers clear evidence that the problematic association between consequentialist moral
reasoning and measures of anti-social individual differences does not generalize to
consequentialist moral reasoning in other types of trolley dilemmas.
It is important to point out that the current studies do not directly prove that the intra-
individual consistency driving participants’ responses is best explained by an explicit
commitment of participants towards a very specific moral philosophy; other mediating
mechanisms may also play a role. Still, it is hard to imagine why responses to physical harm
dilemmas would be related to responses on our monetary dilemma if not for the moral conflict
central to these dilemmas. The most parsimonious explanation for responses on one type of
trolley dilemma predicting responses on the other type is simply that both types of moral
dilemmas share the same moral conflict and that participants’ intuitions on this conflict drive
their responses in both cases. This would suggest that there really is something akin to an
authentic preference for consequentialist moral reasoning.
The results also suggest that the aforementioned associative pattern between primary
psychopathy and responses to physical harm trolley dilemmas could potentially be a by-
product of the idiosyncrasies of the type of dilemma being studied in the traditional trolley
dilemma paradigm, rather than something directly involved in the central moral conflict that
trolley dilemmas aim to investigate (deontological vs. consequentialist thinking). We suggest
that the mentalizing deficits of primary psychopaths (Vonk et al., 2015) in combination with
the hypothetical and unrealistic nature of extreme physical harm dilemmas causes primary
psychopaths to respond more consequentialist than they would when confronted with a real-
life dilemma situation (see for instance, Bostyn et al., 2018). Alternatively, some research has
suggested that moral judgment can partly be driven by strategic self-presentation concerns
(Bostyn & Roets, 2017; Rom & Conway, 2018). It could be that primary psychopaths differ in
BEYOND PHYSICAL HARM 16
this regard and are less reluctant to display consequentialist judgments (which are perceived
as less trustworthy by others). Future research will need to investigate this issue more directly.
Limitations
It is important to point out that the specific procedure we used for the monetary
dilemma does have some limitations. We told each participant that a computer algorithm had
randomly selected two participants out of groups of seven to receive a bonus. We also told
them that they had been additionally selected to decide what should happen to the bonus of
the other selected participant. We did not inform participants whether or not their hypothetical
‘victim’ would be told of their decision, i.e. whether the other selected participant would be
notified that their bonus had been taken away. As such, some participants might have assumed
that their ‘victim’ would be none the wiser and might have been more likely to make
consequentialist decisions. We don’t see an a priori reason to assume this would impact the
relationship between preference for consequentialist reasoning and primary psychopathy but it
is an aspect of our procedure that future research could control more closely.
Additionally, some participants might have thought that the other selected participant
would have been offered the same choice as they were, i.e. that the other participant could
have taken away their bonus. We explicitly told participants that they were additionally
selected for this choice and that they would receive their bonus no matter what they decided.
As such, any considerations of reciprocity would constitute a misinterpretation of the task on
participants’ part. Nevertheless, it could be that a small number of participants might have
considered themselves to be in a symmetrical position with their victims, and if so, this would
have introduced an element of reciprocity into the monetary trolley dilemma that might have
swayed some participants towards the deontological option. We think it unlikely that this was
the case for more than a small subset of participants but again, it is a specific part of our
procedure that future research might want to control more closely.
BEYOND PHYSICAL HARM 17
Conclusion
Based on the results of our studies, the generalizability of preference for
consequentialist moral reasoning across moral domains holds much promise, especially if this
finding holds up for other moral domains as well. Only by studying a larger variety of trolley-
style moral dilemmas can we hope to disentangle people’s preference for consequentialist or
deontological moral thinking from the specifics associated with moral judgments within a
certain moral domain. To capture the full range of moral thought, more research is needed into
dilemmas that do not involve the extreme conditions of traditional trolley research.
BEYOND PHYSICAL HARM 18
Declaration of interest statement
We declare that we have no competing interests.
BEYOND PHYSICAL HARM 19
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Tables
Table 1
Sample size and summary demographical statistics
Wave 1 Wave 2N (Female) Mean Age (SD) N (Female) Mean Age (SD)
Study 1 200 (119) 37.5 (12.8) 170 (102) 38.5 (13.0)Study 2 200 (137) 36.6 (12.0) 160 (109) 37.4 (12.7)Study 3 210 (124) 38.9 (11.9) 171 (104) 39.5 (11.9)Study 4 199 (118) 37.0 (13.6) 169 (101) 37.7 (13.5)
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Table 2.
Regression estimates for a) the relationship between participants’ preference for
consequentialism (as measured by harm-centric trolley dilemmas) with consequentialist
decisions on the monetary trolley dilemma; b) the relationship of primary psychopathy with
preference for consequentialism (as measured by harm-centric trolley dilemmas); c) the
relationship of primary psychopathy with consequentialist decisions on the monetary trolley
dilemma.
Analysis: b se Test Stat. p
a) Consequentialist Choices (monetary dilemma) by Consequentialist Preference (harm dilemmas)
Meta 0.43 0.10 z = 4.50 <.001
Study 1 0.30 0.21 z = 1.43 .153
Study 2 0.23 0.22 z = 1.07 .287
Study 3 0.49 0.18 z = 2.73 .006
Study 4 0.52 0.18 z = 2.89 .003
b ) Consequentialist Preference (harm dilemmas) by Primary Psychopathy
Meta 0.22 0.06 t(76.3) = 3.60 <.001
Study 1 0.10 0.11 t(196) = 0.96 .339
Study 2 0.22 0.11 t(196) = 2.07 .039
Study 3 0.22 0.12 t(206) = 1.79 .075
Study 4 0.33 0.12 t(195) = 2.79 .006
c) Consequentialist Choices (monetary dilemma) by Primary Psychopathy
Meta 0.18 0.15 z = 1.24 .217
Study 1 -0.07 0.30 z = -0.23 .818
Study 2 0.48 0.33 z = 1.49 .136
Study 3 -0.06 0.29 z = -0.22 .827
Study 4 0.41 0.29 z = 1.41 .158
Note. All regressions are controlled for participants’ Age and Gender. The meta-
analytical mixed effect models included a random slope for the main predictor in analyses a)
and b) but only a random-intercept in analysis c) due to convergence issues.