Belief Updating in Moral Dilemmas

Ordering effects, updating effects, and the specter of global skepticism

“…In Sect. 2.2, we sketch a model according to which people update their beliefs in the light of thought experiments that they consider-a proposal that coheres nicely with research suggesting that considering hypothetical scenarios can lead people to update their preferences and beliefs (e.g., Holyoak and Simon 1999;Horne et al 2013Horne et al , 2015. We then argue that thought experiments should be treated as pieces of evidence, and we consider some empirical evidence that people do, in fact, treat thought experiments as pieces of evidence.…”

“…In a recent study, Horne et al (2013) found that people's judgments about the Trolley dilemma are not affected when participants consider emotionally neutral, non-moral dilemmas beforehand (Horne et al 2013). Unsurprisingly, the stimulus presented prior to the Trolley dilemma must be relevant in some fashion to the Trolley Case in order to produce the effect.…”

“…By contrast, suppose that the mean judgment of participants in Condition 2 for the Trolley Case is 4.3, and suppose that the difference between the ratings for the Trolley Case in the two conditions is statistically significant. Finally, suppose that the mean rating for the Footbridge Case in Condition 2 is 2.1, which we may suppose is statistically indistinguishable from the mean rating for the Footbridge Case in Condition 1 (for real examples, see Horne et al 2013;Cushman 2012, 2015;Wiegmann and Waldmann 2014). The experiment is pictured schematically in Table 3.…”

“…See Table 3 in Hummel and Holyoak (2003) for a short list of functional properties that schemas have. 8 See Horne et al (2013) for a similar account. 9 However, at this point it is unknown whether people update their schemas explicitly or implicitly.…”

“…We now consider two studies supporting the preceding claim. Horne et al (2013) assigned participants to read one of three thought experiments: a Control Case, the Trolley Case, or the Footbridge Case. 11 After making a judgment about one of these thought experiments, participants were asked to rate the extent to which they agreed with the following statement on a 7-point Likert scale, anchored at (1) strongly disagree and (7) strongly agree:…”