¶ … Earlier this month an Italian research team jointly authored a research article titled "Affective Basis of Judgment-Behavior Discrepancy in Virtual Experiences of Moral Dilemmas," with the results of their findings published in the scholarly journal Social Neuroscience. Lead by cognitive neuroscience specialist Indrajeet Patel, the research team sought to explore how an individual's response to hypothetical value judgments and moral dilemmas may be altered when presented with a virtual reality experience simulating the same moral dilemma. According to the research team's explanation of their experiment provided in the Abstract, "although research in moral psychology in the last decade has relied heavily on hypothetical moral dilemmas and has been effective in understanding moral judgment, how these judgments translate into behaviors remains a largely unexplored issue due to the harmful nature of the acts involved,"1 but by using a virtual reality desktop...

In the authors' collective estimation, the gulf between non-utilitarian judgments made by subjects exposed to textual moral dilemmas (in which people tend to abstain from making choices which may result in the death of another), and the utilitatian behavior demonstrated by people in similar real-world situations (in which the tendency is to save as many lives as possible) by testing subjects' responses to textual and virtual reality dilemmas.
1. Indrajeet Patel, Carlotta Cogoni, Nicola Zangrando, Luca Chittaro, and Giorgia Silani. "Affective basis of judgment-behavior discrepancy in virtual experiences of moral dilemmas." Social Neuroscience 9, no. 1 (2014): 94-107.

In describing the structure of their experimental design, the researchers reveal that a total of 40 healthy test subjects between the ages of 18 and 28 were selected for participation, with the classic…