People Become More Utilitarian When They Face Moral Dilemmas In Virtual Reality

Posted by Unknown on Thursday January 9, 2014 @08:01AM from the morbid-virtual-reality dept.

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."

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Utilitarianism by turkeydance · 2014-01-09 08:14 · Score: 1, Funny

it's the new you!
Oh, come on. by Anonymous Coward · 2014-01-09 08:20 · Score: 4, Funny

... (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.
Re:Utilitarianism is correct by Anonymous Coward · 2014-01-09 08:48 · Score: 3, Funny

Maybe it's best to try and switch the lines but fail. Then you only have one count of attempted murder.
Re: Measurement of utility by ACE209 · 2014-01-09 13:56 · Score: 5, Funny

So that makes it moral to kill people?
Depends on the quality of loot they drop.

--
"we are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."