Programming Impacts Responses to Moral Dilemmas
33 Pages Posted: 6 Feb 2023
Date Written: February 2, 2023
Abstract
We examine if performing a programming task alters a decision-makers’ response to a well-known moral dilemma, the trolley problem. In the problem, the decision-maker must choose between an action that would sacrifice a single innocent life or inaction, sacrificing multiple lives. We argue that performing a programming task requires structured, rule-based cognition, resulting in a deliberative mindset. This mindset leads decision-makers to prefer sacrificing a single life to save multiple lives, known as the utilitarian choice to the moral dilemma. Through a series of experiments with computer programmers we find that (1) programming increases the prevalence of utilitarian choices on the trolley problem (2) this shift is stronger for lower-experienced programmers (3) programming’s shift to utilitarian choices is stronger for programmers who have lower motivation for cognitive reasoning. These results contribute to our understanding of how programming impacts human cognition and the biases programmers experience when designing algorithms. We discuss the implications of our results for programmers, organizations, and society.
Keywords: Moral Decision-Making, Programming, Trolley Problem, Programming Bias, Autonomous Vehicles
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