Beyond physical harm: how preference for consequentialism and primary psychopathy relate to decisions on a monetary trolley dilemma

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-focussed, consequentialist moral reasoning with principle-focussed, deontological moral reasoning. The present studies investigate whether participants’ preference for consequentialism generalises 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 generalise 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

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

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.