The Problem with the Trolley Problem and the Need for Systems Thinking

The Trolley Problem has inspired scores of psychology experiments, including MIT's Moral Machine,1 an online survey where people had to decide what a self-driving car should do in case of an impending accident. Participants were given a series of pairs of scenarios, presented as map-like diagrams, with various numbers and types of pedestrians and passengers. For each pair of scenarios, they had to choose between options such as driving ahead and killing pedestrians, or veering into an obstacle and killing passengers. Based on 40 million responses from more than 200 countries, they found general preferences, such as sparing humans over animals. They also found differences between cultures. People from countries with collectivistic cultures prefer sparing lives of older people instead of the lives of younger people.