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People Become More Utilitarian When They Face Moral Dilemmas In Virtual Reality
First time accepted submitter vrml writes "Critical situations in which participant's actions lead to the death of (virtual) humans have been employed in a study of moral dilemmas which just appeared in the Social Neuroscience journal. The experiment shows that participants' behavior becomes more utilitarian (that is, they tend to minimize the number of persons killed) when they have to take a decision in Virtual Reality rather than the more traditional settings used in Moral Psychology which ask participants to read text descriptions of the critical situations. A video with some of the VR moral dilemmas is available, as is the paper."
it's the new you!
So, we're assuming that all participants considered the death of (virtual) humans to be a bad thing?
Every other moral system makes claims it can't provide real justification for. Minimizing harm and maximizing benefit is the best you can manage(and sometimes you don't know enough to do that either)
In games like Counter-Strike: Global Offense, I take hostages, set up bombs are willing to give up my virtual live to protect it from being defused, kill people.
While in reality I'm not a suicide bombing terrorist. Who would have guess?
I get through a million virtual dollars in a single session of online poker. And you should have seem my driving on RollCage.
What's the point here?
... (they tend to minimize the number of persons killed)
Anyone who's played Black & White knows that's not true. They don't even minimize the number of persons killed by poop.
"Become more utilitarian", i.e. they choose to save more lives, which is already at 88% in a non-VR, simple textual scenario like the trolly switch issue.
This is odd, because in most scenarios of VR, people seem to want to throw a switch to deliberately divert a trolly from one person to kill 5 instead, as long as they have a chat line where they can type "lolf49z!"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Neither are zombies, orcs, demons, pokemon, night elves, trolls, ogres, dragons, sprites byads, naga, Protoss, Zerg, Skrull, ents, vampires or werewolves.
I feel absolutely no guilt in making their little pixel bodies explode in geysers of blood and gore.
One issue that studies never seem to take into account is responsibility.
If a group of people will be killed but you could decide to kill a single person, there is a third option: you could choose not to decide.
When you switch the tracks you are taking responsibility for making the decision, and all consequences thereto. There will be an inquest, you will be brought up under charges for manslaughter, your actions will be made public in the newspaper... all sorts of bad things will happen, and your life will be forever changed.
For a recent example, consider the recent Asiana Airlines Flight 214, where a woman was run over by a fire truck. The battalion chief responsible for directing operations was put through the wringer by over-zealous bureaucrats looking for someone to blame. His helmet cam footage was all that saved him. Blameless, he only narrowly escaped taking the blame.
If you simply walk away, then it's not your problem. The responsibility lies somewhere else, no one can blame you for not making the decision. You weren't expected to handle it, it's not your fault.
This makes perfect sense in the current study: there's no consequences for killing virtual people, so it's easy to make the moral choice.
Real morality takes courage, and the willingness to sacrifice.
At a low level.. you know it;s not real. You don't have any moral attachments to any people. It's like playing risk versus leading real troops into battle.
I can't believe that people still think that these trolley car "thought experiments" are telling them anything novel about human moral instincts.
All they are are less-visceral variations on Milgram's famous work. An authority figure tells you you must kill either the hot chick on the left or the ugly fatty on the right and that you mustn't sound the alarm or call 9-1-1 or anything else. And, just as Milgram found out, virtually everybody goes ahead and does horrific things in such circumstances.
Just look at the videos in question. The number of laws and safety regulations and bad designs of the evil-mad-scientist variety in each scenario are innumerable. They take it beyond Milgram's use of a white lab coat to establish authority and into psychotic Nazi commander territory. In the real world, the victims wouldn't be anywhere near where they are. If they were, there wouldn't be any operations in progress at the site. If there were, there would be competent operators at the controls, not the amateur being manipulated by the experimenter; and those operators would be well drilled in both standard and emergency procedures that would prevent the disaster or mitigate it if unavoidable -- for example, airline pilots trained to the point of instinct to avoid crashing a doomed plane into a crowded area.
The proper role of the experimenter's victims ("subjects") is to yell for help, to not fucking touch critical safety infrastructure in the event of a crisis unless instructed to by a competent professional, to render first aid to the best of their abilities once help is on the way, and to assist investigators however possible once the dust has settled.
Yet, of course, the experimenter is too wrapped up in the evil genius role to permit their victims to even consider anything like that, and instead convinces the victims that they're bad people who'll kill innocents when ordered to. Just as we already knew from Milgram.
How any of this bullshit makes it past ethics review boards is utterly beyond me.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
Like kobayashi maru, tic-tac-toe, and thermonuclear war...
The only way to win is not to play.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
this "vr" is really stupid. The best approximation of reality they can do is to offer a binary choice. This is unnatural and not predictive of people's behavior. In real situations, people think they have more courses of action, even when they don't: they would scream at the people to get out of the way, in a (possibly futile) attempt to save everybody, in addition to playing with the switch and attempting other things as well.
Very rarely we are presented with dangerous situations in life where the choice is clearly between two and two only, mutually exclusive, time critical courses of action.
When the lifting magnet dropped the car on the guy's head, I laughed. It was funny because the door flung open, or maybe because it just had a certain cartoony look about it. It could have been an anvil or a safe, then it would have been even funnier. Then of course there's the whole premise of a bunch of guys sort of doing a slow dance in a salvage yard, and they don't even look like yard workers at all. It's just too surreal.
In real life, the car falls on the guy's head without any moral dilemma. It's just... bam! In the unlikely event that you have any time to react at all, there is no moral decision at all on the part of the operator. He'll just avoid hitting the first thing he sees, or fall back on training that's ingrained into his muscles. In real life, it's not funny.
Experiments with that kind of VR don't convince me of very much. OK, time to roll it again and see that guy get crushed, and then... maybe a classic Bugs Bunny cartoon.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
So... more realisting simulations yield more realistic results?
I suspect there's a film at 11.
Does anyone else think this video is funny as shit?
= Less people murdered per second
Captcha: slaying
Yelling, "get the fuck off the train tracks, you fucking morons!"
Then let Darwin take care of the rest.
I thought it said "Unitarian".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is exactly like Enders Game. If you dissociate yourself from the consequences of reality, and think things are just a game, or exercise without consequences, that you want to do the best at, you will achieve the same goals faster and better with less losses than if you are empathising about the consequences from a the affected individuals perspective.
However, in life, our goals and purposes are changed by empathy for others, which is the driver to have evolved a moral compass.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
That's because it isn't a moral dilemma, it's virtual reality.
Twinstiq, game news
There's a series of good studies, done with brain scanning in place, described in Joshua Greene's Moral Tribes, Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them, New York (Penguin), 2013.
davecb@spamcop.net
Sure it's VR but what are we comparing it to? The actual experiment? No. We are comparing it to hypothetical talk. So between VR and talk, I would guess VR gives the more realistic view of what people would do. Talk is cheap. You don't know what you'd do until you are in the situation.
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Here is the problem: In these virtual scenarios, there is a binary choice and in both choices somebody dies.
However, in reality people try to find alternative solutions that none of these tests take into account. In these scenarios the viewer cannot attempt to warn or alert the victims. The victims idly reside to their fates and make no attempt to protect or preserve their lives.
In other words: These tests do little to prove anything. Most of the viewers taking these tests know that it is VR. How does the tests take into account people knowing this and not considering the choices "moral" but rather a video game score?
How was the test conducted?
If it were done in a university lab setting, I assume most people would try to take the minimize death routes so they can appear normal to the examiners... and I would probably do the same.
But if it were a game freely downloaded in the privacy of one's own home that anonymously reported choices, I assume many would take other routes for entertainment purposes.
In the paper based scenario the participant is present as a moral agent in a real world scenario with the moral and legal responsibility that implies. In the VR scenario the participant is god with no moral or legal responsibility.