Crowdsourcing moral psychology

Ethical trade-off surveys have played a key role in building a data-driven understanding of human moral psychology. They have been conducted all over the world for decades, eliciting assessment of ethical dilemma outcomes from populations as diverse as those of rural, tribal settlements, and industrialized, information-age, cosmopolitan cities. While much data has been gathered through these surveys, attempts to compare what people across cultures consider ethically justifiable have been hindered by the fact that the surveys used have been reformulated for different cultures in the scenarios they depict, and in their framing. The objective of this thesis project is to build a survey tool with global reach and internationalized surveys, in order to collect survey data from around the world using consistent scenarios and framing. Building on the precedent and success of the Moral Machine tool for surveying people around the world regarding ethical dilemmas involving autonomous vehicles, I built and deployed a tool for conducting surveys with scenarios of the classic action/omission trolley problem, to collect ethical dilemma survey data internationally, in ten languages, for three variants of the trolley problem - one for remote action/omission with no double effect consideration, one for double effect consideration with direct action/omission, and one for double effect consideration with remote action/omission. Analyzing data from this experiment, I conclude that differences in preferences across the variants are confirmed across populations, and that they are universal across populations in order of preference.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Dsouza, Sohan Savio.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Andrew Lippman.

• Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/130838

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/130838