Date of Submission

Spring 2024

Academic Program

Psychology

Project Advisor 1

Justin Dainer-Best

Project Advisor 2

Kristin Lane

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Personal connections that are established with interpersonal relationships have an impact on moral decision-making. This concept will be tested when considering the trolley dilemma archetype. The trolley dilemma presents a situation where an individual is prompted to choose between a series of options that will save one party yet cause the death or injury of another. The present study will use the trolley dilemma to test whether participants are more likely to make a prosocial decision than a self-serving decision when put in a predicament that forces them to choose between their interests and the greater good of society. To conclude, this study will prompt a pool of online participants to give names of people with whom they have specified personal relationships. Following this, the survey will prompt the participants to interact with a series of curated trolley dilemmas that utilize their interpersonal relationships compared to strangers when measuring their response to close relationships versus situations involving strangers. Results will measure the effect that interpersonal relationships have on individuals when they are making moral decisions. This study hypothesizes that prosocial or selfish choices will be impacted by whether the persons in the dilemma are of significant personal value to the participant. Participants in differing populations, i.e., child versus adult, may be more drawn to saving certain groups. This aspect will also be measured regarding the condition’s significance to the participants when choosing who should live in the trolley dilemma. Additionally, these results will consider anxiety's effect on the decision-making process. This will be done by collecting GAD-7 results and relating them to the collected data.

Open Access Agreement

Open Access

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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