Jiang Xinyu, Harvey Nigel
University College London, London, United Kingdom.
Front Psychol. 2025 Apr 15;16:1448153. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1448153. eCollection 2025.
Samples of English and Chinese people judged the likelihood that they would sacrifice the life (or health) of one person to save the life (or health) of five people by performing an impersonal action (flipping a switch) or a personal one (pushing someone over a bridge). They also judged how many people out of 100 would consider their choice to be morally acceptable. Judgments by people in the two cultures were similar in two ways. First and consistently with previous work, people in both groups were more likely to sacrifice one life to save five when the action was impersonal; however, they were no more likely to make that sacrifice to save the health of five people than to save the lives of those people. Second, the likelihood of people in both cultures deciding on a sacrificial action was less than their assessments of the likelihood that such an action was morally acceptable, a result that is the opposite of what has been previously found. This contrast can be explained by recognizing the difference between asking people to assess how acceptable moral choices are to participants themselves (previous reports) and asking them to judge how acceptable those choices are to other people (this report). The two cultures also differed in two ways. Chinese participants (a) showed a larger difference between the likelihood of people acting and their assessments of the likelihood that acting would be acceptable to others, and (b) were less likely to act in impersonal dilemmas. These cross-cultural differences imply that Chinese participants were more influenced by their judgments of what other people would think about sacrificial action.
以英文和中文为样本的人群判断了他们通过执行非个人行为（拨动开关）或个人行为（将某人推下桥）来牺牲一人的生命（或健康）以拯救五人的生命（或健康）的可能性。他们还判断了100人中会有多少人认为他们的选择在道德上是可以接受的。两种文化背景下人群的判断在两个方面是相似的。首先，与之前的研究一致，当行为是非个人行为时，两组人群都更有可能牺牲一人来拯救五人；然而，他们为拯救五人的健康而做出这种牺牲的可能性并不比为拯救那些人的生命而做出牺牲的可能性更大。其次，两种文化背景下的人群决定采取牺牲行为的可能性低于他们对这种行为在道德上可接受可能性的评估，这一结果与之前的发现相反。这种差异可以通过认识到要求人们评估道德选择对参与者自身的可接受程度（之前的报告）与要求他们判断这些选择对其他人的可接受程度（本报告）之间的差异来解释。两种文化也在两个方面存在差异。中国参与者（a）在人们采取行动的可能性与其对该行为对他人可接受可能性的评估之间表现出更大的差异，并且（b）在非个人困境中采取行动的可能性更小。这些跨文化差异意味着中国参与者更容易受到他们对他人对牺牲行为看法的判断的影响。
