The Trolley Problem was designed to test the boundaries of moral philosophy and ethics by presenting subjects with different scenarios of the same basic moral dilemma: A train (or trolley) is traveling down the tracks and headed for a group of four to five people who are stuck. The bystander can either choose to do nothing and let the small group of people die, or sacrifice one stranger to save the others. We investigated college students’ responses to four variations of the Trolley Problem and compared them to subjects’ scores on the Ethics Position Questionnaire, which measures individual differences in moral thought. In previous studies using the Trolley Problem, around 95% of subjects did not feel morally obligated to act on the situation and, therefore, chose to do nothing. Our study demonstrated the opposite, with most subjects choosing to sacrifice one life to save four others in three of our four scenarios. When their decisions were compared with scores on the EPQ, we found that the subjects who chose to not act in the scenarios scored higher than those who chose to engage in the dilemmas.

Morality & Ethics in Relation to the Trolley Problem