Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research has shown that most people find it morally acceptable to pull a switch-track lever that will sacrificeone life in order to save five lives. People, however, judge as less morally acceptable the decision to save five lives bypulling a lever that will open a trap-door to sacrifice an individual standing on it (Greene et al., 2009). We measuredthe force participants exert pulling a lever when considering the switch-track and trap-door trolley problem scenarios.We counterbalanced the presentation order of scenarios and only analyzed the movement force of participants who haddecided to pull the lever in both scenarios. We observed in our preliminary results (n=29) more vigorous lever pullingduring the more morally acceptable switch-track scenario relative to the less morally acceptable trap-door scenario.