You’re surely aware, by now, of the Trolley Problem, the most famous of the thought experiments philosophers like to construct when they really ought to be working. But, to recap: a runaway train is hurtling down a track towards five railway workers who’ll be killed unless you pull a lever that will divert it to a siding, where there’s only one worker, who’ll be killed instead. Do you pull the lever? This question sorts people into those for whom all that matters are the consequences (how many humans end up dead?) versus those who think it’s wrong to be the active cause of someone’s death. Most people claim to be the former, until you tweak the story so the dilemma is whether to push a fat man off a bridge to stop the train and save the five workers. Suddenly, barely anyone is willing to say they’d make the active choice, though the death toll remains identical.

A third group of people just finds thought experiments annoyingly unrealistic: in reality, that train would still be stuck in a station 20 miles back, “waiting for a crew member”. A new study from Ghent University in Belgium is for them. How do people respond to such dilemmas, the researchers wondered, in real life? Due to the rampant spread of health-and-safety culture, they couldn’t use real trains and actually kill people. Instead, they used mice. All participants answered a raft of moral hypotheticals, but some then faced a real-world choice: would they stand by while a countdown clock ticked down, whereupon five mice would receive a painful but non-lethal electric shock? Or would they press a button, diverting the shock to a cage containing a single mouse? (The setup wasn’t really real, to be clear: no mice were shocked.) People turned out to be much less likely to choose the passive option when it was no longer hypothetical. When real suffering is involved – even mouse suffering – more of us are willing to do what it takes to minimise harmful consequences, whatever our abstract principles.

There’s a lesson here, I think, that goes beyond improbable train-related emergencies to any contexts in which we’re trying to predict how we’d respond to events: moral dilemmas, but also how we’d cope with a breakup or bereavement, whether we’d flourish or founder if we switched careers, whether we’d be happier moving to another city, and so on. Thinking ahead to any such situation – as when contemplating the Trolley Problem – you’re obliged to rely on your intellect and powers of reasoning. You try to think of all relevant variables, and figure out how they’d interact.

Yet when you get there, as when those experimental subjects saw the mice, it’s another matter. You respond not just intellectually but emotionally and bodily; your automatic, intuitive brain (“system one”, in Daniel Kahneman’s terminology) kicks in; and even on the intellectual level, there may be numerous variables you’d failed to think of.

Hypothetical thinking, in short, can only ever be a pale imitation of real life. On balance, that’s good news: a reason to worry less about the future, and trust that, if the situation you’re fretting about occurs, you might surprise yourself by knowing precisely what to do.

Read

Would You Kill The Fat Man?, by David Edmonds, is the definitive account of “trolleyology”, and an unnerving way to discover that your moral principles are a lot more fluid than you thought.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com

Read this: In her 2017 book We Need To Talk, the American journalist Celeste Headlee investigates why we’re so remarkably bad at listening to other viewpoints, and offers strikingly useful tips for better conversation.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com