Vsauce
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2021–2026
34:38 · 16M views · Dec 6, 2017
Vsauce's Michael Stevens stages a realistic version of the trolley problem with unsuspecting subjects who believe they must decide a life-or-death outcome. The Mind Field episode compares what people say they would do with what they actually do.
Recommended as a worthwhile real-world experiment whenever trolley problems or moral dilemmas come up.
3 comments from Hacker News
> Perhaps something to think about in a scenario like this. Personally I think it's interesting that some people are so quick to condone aggressive attacks on powerful people, yet have no comment on those powerful people committing lower levels of violence against the masses. It's all social context. Can I just say that out of all of this discourse happening, this might be the most insightful yet succint position to explain my stance on all of this especially the "its all social context." line. I feel like many of us here might share an answer publicly but I have always believed that if I am in the shoes of someone else, I might act the way they do so in a sense I understand the human part of it. A human did the violence and why. I understand that. Now we can call this violence inhuman, sure, but this action is still done by human and for many reasons. And I also understand why people condemn these actions, we wish to live in a clean and structural world and then we see the messiness of the world. I just feel like just condemning an action would do nothing unless we change the ground conditions but that isn't in the hands of even many of us Hackernews users and this is basically a class aspect to it. I personally feel like there are some similarities to this incident to the Trolley problem actually. Vsauce did a video about it worth watching[0] Thank you for writing this comment. [0]: this video
The youtube channel vsauce tried putting people in this situation by putting them in a fake railroad switching outpost and having the operator step out for a phonecall. They took care to educate the subject exactly on how the system works without them suspecting anything, trying to eliminate many of the factors you mention. The video is well worth a watch this video
They did this experiment in real life this video . It's not 100% perfect but it is still an amazing test.