Personality differences predict decision-making in an accident situation in virtual driving

Understanding how humans make decisions in challenging situations - such as trying to save peoples' lives even though this endangers one's own life - is crucial in optimizing rescue operations and dealing with natural disasters and other crises. The experimental study of these decisions, however, has often been done using text-based surveys, which is known to emphasize rational and reflective judgments. Here, we used virtual reality to investigate decision-making in a real-world context, in which a decision needs to be made intuitively under time pressure - for this we simulated an accident situation in an immersive virtual driving scenario. In the scenario, participants were told to race a course as fast as possible. After training, participants were confronted with the sudden appearance of pedestrians on the race course. We observed three different behaviors: group one ignored the pedestrians and/or hit the accelerator, group two hit the brake, and group three tried to steer the car to avoid pedestrians. We found that most Avoid-group participants had more real and virtual driving experience compared to the other two groups and they also felt more competent during the game as measured by subjective game experience questionnaires. Importantly, results from established personality questionnaires showed that participants who did not brake (therefore potentially harming the pedestrians) had significantly lower scores in perspective-taking and higher scores in psychopathy compared to participants who tried to avoid the accident situation. Our results demonstrate that personality differences to some degree are able to predict intuitive decision-making and that such processes can be studied in a controlled, immersive VR simulation.

[1]  J. Tschopp,et al.  An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment , 2007 .

[2]  Kate M. Johnson,et al.  Cultural differences in moral judgment and behavior, across and within societies. , 2016, Current opinion in psychology.

[3]  K A Kiehl,et al.  Assessing psychopathic attributes in a noninstitutionalized population. , 1995, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[4]  C. Navarrete,et al.  Virtual morality: emotion and action in a simulated three-dimensional "trolley problem". , 2012, Emotion.

[5]  Maria V. Sanchez-Vives,et al.  A Virtual Reprise of the Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiments , 2006, PloS one.

[6]  Jonathan D. Cohen,et al.  Cognitive load selectively interferes with utilitarian moral judgment , 2008, Cognition.

[7]  Luke Clark,et al.  Serotonin selectively influences moral judgment and behavior through effects on harm aversion , 2010, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[8]  Jesse Graham,et al.  Moral identity in psychopathy , 2010, Judgment and Decision Making.

[9]  B. Moore,et al.  Perspective-taking and altruism. , 1982 .

[10]  D. DeSteno,et al.  Manipulations of Emotional Context Shape Moral Judgment , 2006, Psychological science.

[11]  Michael Koenigs,et al.  Utilitarian moral judgment in psychopathy. , 2012, Social cognitive and affective neuroscience.

[12]  Joshua D. Greene,et al.  A Dissociation Between Moral Judgments and Justifications , 2007 .

[13]  Andrew D. Engell,et al.  The Neural Bases of Cognitive Conflict and Control in Moral Judgment , 2004, Neuron.

[14]  Joshua D. Greene.  The secret joke of Kant's soul. , 2008 .

[15]  Katja Wiech,et al.  Cold or calculating? Reduced activity in the subgenual cingulate cortex reflects decreased emotional aversion to harming in counterintuitive utilitarian judgment , 2013, Cognition.

[16]  S. Choe,et al.  Who makes utilitarian judgments? The influences of emotions on utilitarian judgments , 2011, Judgment and Decision Making.

[17]  Luca Chittaro,et al.  Affective basis of judgment-behavior discrepancy in virtual experiences of moral dilemmas , 2014, Social neuroscience.

[18]  J. Savulescu,et al.  ‘Utilitarian’ judgments in sacrificial moral dilemmas do not reflect impartial concern for the greater good , 2015, Cognition.

[19]  Luca Chittaro,et al.  Desktop virtual reality for emergency preparedness: user evaluation of an aircraft ditching experience under different fear arousal conditions , 2014, VRST '14.

[20]  Mark H. Davis.  Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. , 1983 .

[21]  M. Hauser,et al.  The Role of Conscious Reasoning and Intuition in Moral Judgment , 2006, Psychological science.

[22]  Michael Koenigs,et al.  Psychopathy increases perceived moral permissibility of accidents. , 2012, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[23]  Maaike Cima,et al.  Psychopaths know right from wrong but don't care. , 2010, Social cognitive and affective neuroscience.

[24]  A. Colman,et al.  Cultural differences in responses to real-life and hypothetical trolley problems , 2014, Judgment and Decision Making.

[25]  Christine Deruelle,et al.  High levels of psychopathic traits alters moral choice but not moral judgment , 2013, Front. Hum. Neurosci..

[26]  Joshua D. Greene.  The Cognitive Neuroscience of Moral Judgment , 2010 .

[27]  Daniel M. Bartels,et al.  The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas , 2011, Cognition.

[28]  M. Slater,et al.  Bystander Responses to a Violent Incident in an Immersive Virtual Environment , 2013, PloS one.

[29]  Elinor Amit,et al.  You See, the Ends Don’t Justify the Means , 2012, Psychological science.

[30]  Gordon Pipa,et al.  Forced-choice decision-making in modified trolley dilemma situations: a virtual reality and eye tracking study , 2014, Front. Behav. Neurosci..

[31]  John Mikhail,et al.  Universal moral grammar: theory, evidence and the future , 2007, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[32]  Ralph Hertwig,et al.  Time and moral judgment , 2011, Cognition.

[33]  J. Thomson.  The Trolley Problem , 1985 .