In Cognitive Science
The trolley problem was first imported into cognitive science from philosophy in a systematic way by John Mikhail, who began testing trolley problems on different groups of people, including children and people from non-Western cultures, when he was a visiting graduate student in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Mikhail hypothesized that factors such as gender, age, education level, and cultural background would have little influence on the judgments people make, in part because those judgments are generated by an unconscious “moral grammar” that is analogous in some respects to the unconscious linguistic grammars that support ordinary language use. Preliminary results pointed in that direction, and Mikhail’s initial findings have been confirmed and expanded to more than 200,000 individuals from over 100 countries.
Read more about this topic: Trolley Problem
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