Why do people seem to be more utilitarian in VR than in questionnaires?

Several experimental studies on moral judgment and moral decision-making show that in virtual reality people tend to make more characteristically utilitarian decisions than when responding to standard questionnaires. An explanation of this phenomenon that has been considered by many authors states that the feature of VR studies that is responsible for this effect is the visual salience of the harmful consequences of deontological decisions. The present paper makes three points, the first of which is theoretical: we argue that this explanation, which draws from Cushman's dual-process account of moral judgment, is in fact not coherent with this account's predictions with respect to behavior in VR. The second point is that this explanation does not sufficiently explain the existing empirical findings concerning the footbridge dilemma because these studies differ in important aspects of experimental design from studies on the switch dilemma. The third point is empirical: we present two original VR studies that were designed to check the robustness of the increased utilitarian tendency and directly test the explanation that is based on the visual salience of harmful consequences. The results of the experiments provide evidence that the effect is quite robust but the proposed explanation is inadequate.

Automated summary

Several studies have shown that people tend to make more utilitarian decisions in virtual reality than in standard questionnaires. However, the existing explanation based on the visual salience of harmful consequences is not coherent with the predictions of the moral judgment dual-process account. This paper presents two original VR studies that test the robustness of the increased utilitarian tendency and find the proposed explanation inadequate.