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Could the device, smartphone or PC，which you're using affect the moral decisions you make when using it? To test it, researchers presented multiple dilemmas to a sample set of 1,010 people. The participants were assigned a device at random.
One case of the questions participants were asked is the classic “trolley (有轨电车) problem”: A runaway trolley is headed towards five people tied up on a set of train tracks. You can do nothing, resulting in the deaths of five people, or push a man off a bridge, which will stop the trolley. The practical response is to kill one man to save five lives, which 33.5 percent of smartphone users chose, compared to 22.3 percent of PC users.
“What we found in our study is that when people used a smartphone to view classic moral problems, they were more likely to make more unemotional, reasonable decisions when presented with a highly emotional dilemma, ”Dr Albert Barque-Duran, the lead author of the study, told City, University of London. “This could be due to the increased time pressure often present with smartphones and also the increased psychological distance which can occur when we use such devices compared to PCs.”
As for why the researchers started this study, Dr Barque-Duran noted, “Due to the fact that our social lives, work and even shopping take place online, it is important to think about how the contexts where we typically face moral decisions and are asked to engage in moral behavior have changed, and the impact this could have on the hundreds of millions of people who use such devices daily.” It's clear that we need more research on how our devices affect our moral decision making because we're using screens at an ever-increasing rate.
