What made MSU psychology professor Carlos Navarrete’s experiment unique was that participants wore a special helmet that covered their eyes and ears to put them in a digital environment where they could see the outcome of their decisions.

“They’re not told that this is a moral dilemma, they’re not told anything,” Navarrete said. “They’re just presented with the dilemma itself, and they work their way through it.”

About 90 percent of the approximately 300 MSU students that participated in his 2009 experiment, which is set to be published this month in the journal “Emotion,” chose to divert the boxcar so that it killed the single person rather than the group of five, Navarrete said.

“People … are willing to kill one person to save the lives of five people, at least in the virtual world,” he said. “Sometimes people never get to that point. The emotional (toll) of actually harming somebody is just too powerful.”

Kinesiology freshman Joanna Beaton said she wasn’t sure if she could get herself to make a decision if placed in the experiment, but her thought process would be based on saving as many lives as possible.

“I would want to switch it to the other (track). But then at the same time, that’s somebody’s life, too,” Beaton said.

Before encountering the ethical dilemma, the subjects in Navarrete’s study practiced during a few trial rounds in situations with people on only one set of train tracks to get them comfortable with the environment and the equipment, Navarrete said. Electrodes were placed on participants’ fingertips to measure their level of nervousness or anxiety during the process.

“Their nervous system actually becomes more activated,” he said. “We think this happens because they’re psychologically conflicted, and if you’re psychologically conflicted, you’re less likely to act.”

Hilde Lindemann, professor of philosophy, said there are many variations on the Trolley Experiment, including one that hypothetically puts the subject in one of the boxcars and one where subjects can sacrifice a fat man by throwing him onto the tracks to stop the boxcar.

“There is a smokeless industry in philosophy called ‘trolleyology’ because so many people have done it,” she said.

Lindemann said testing college-age students in the situation doesn’t show much valuable evidence because the subjects don’t have much life experience.

“The trouble with the trolley problem is that if you actually test people with it, you only know what their instincts are,” she said. “It doesn’t tell you much about the right thing to do.”