Affective Basis of Judgment Behavior Discrepancy in Virtual Experiences of Moral Dilemmas

¶ … 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 computing platform, this divide can be adequately addressed. 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 "trolley dilemma" serving as the behavioral stimuli. In the "trolley dilemma" an individual is asked to decide between two terrible choices, with a runaway trolley speeding towards five potential victims, and the subject capable of throwing a switch to divert the trolley by sending it toward a single potential victim instead. The researchers randomly exposed each of the test subjects to both the textual and virtual reality version of the "trolley dilemma," with an experimental control provided by having half of the subjects view the text version first, while the other half participated in the virtual reality component before reading the text. A battery of tests were performed during the experiment in order to assess electrodermal activity, response time, and a number of other critical variables. As the authors state in the Discussion section of the article, "moral dilemmas create a decision space which pits the utilitarian rule dictating preference for lives of many over lives of few against the deontological rule prohibiting actively or passively killing innocent few to save many,"2 and it was precisely this decision space which they sought to quantify. According to the research team's results, participants in the study expressed a non-utilitarian preference when exposed to the text version of the "trolley dilemma," but a demonstrable shift occurred whereby "even though some of the participants judged sacri-cing one to save many as morally inappropriate in text dilemmas, when full spectrum of contextual cues was provided using VR environment, they resorted to act in utilitarian fashion contradicting their earlier endorsement of deontological principle."3