Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas

The authors do not claim that only people with antisocial personality traits tend to choose utilitarian responses:

What do those 10% of people who are comfortable with the utilitarian solution to the footbridge dilemma look like? Might these utilitarians have other psychological characteristics in common? Recently, consistent with the view that rational individuals are more likely to endorse utilitarianism (e.g., Greene et al., 2001), a variety of researchers have shown that individuals with higher working memory capacity and those who are more deliberative thinkers are, indeed, more likely to approve of utilitarian solutions (Bartels, 2008; Feltz & Cokely, 2008; Moore, Clark, & Kane, 2008). [...]

Yet in addition to the link between deliberative thinkers and utilitarian judgments, there is another possible psychological route to utilitarian preferences—the ability to inhibit emotional reactions to harm (or the inability to experience such emotions in the first place).

I was not previously aware of the evidence linking deliberative thinking to utilitarianism, and many other LWers probably aren't. By presenting only the evidence about antisocial personality traits in the post, I think you're giving people a biased impression of the actual state of knowledge in this area of moral psychology.

Luke quoted Joshua Greene as saying:

...deontological judgments tend to be driven by emotional responses, and... deontological philosophy, rather than being grounded in moral reasoning, is to a large extent an exercise in moral rationalization. This is in contrast to consequentialism, which, I will argue, arises from rather different psychological processes, ones that are more 'cognitive,' and more likely to involve genuine moral reasoning...

If this is true, then it makes sense that people who don't have emotional responses to moral questions won't be deontologists.

Think of it as a conflict between a special moral module and general purpose reasoning. General purpose reasoning that you'd use in eg economics tells you that if you lose $100 to gain $200, you come out ahead - it's utilitarian. The special moral module is what makes most people naturally deontologists instead.

You can end up utilitarian either because you're a psychopath and don't have the special moral module - in which case you default to general purpose reasoning - or because you're very philosophical and have a specific preference for determining moral questions by the same logic with which you determine everything else, thus deliberately overruling the special moral module.

Kind and philosophical utilitarians of the sort one meets on LW would be extremely unlikely to act in practice according to the implications of their favored theories in real-life "sacrificial" situations

I don't think you should be quite so certain of this.

The differences between the tasks that the different groups choose utilitarianism on seems interesting. It seems like Machiavellians take advantage of weakness more than Psychopaths, while Psychopaths are more okay with choosing who to kill arbitrarily.

Psychopaths choose the utilitarian answer on Trespassers, Hostages, Plane Crash, Prisoners of War, Surgery, and Footbridge the most out of all the groups.

• Trespassers, Hostages, Plane Crash, and Prisoners of War all involve killing one member of a group that you're a part of in order to save the rest of the group from external forces. Plane Crash has the added difference that the member killed is injured, and it's suggested that he's eaten afterwards.

• Surgery (the one with the patient you can kill to donate their organs to 5 other patients) and Footbridge (aka Trolley) involve killing individuals in order to same larger numbers of people.

Machiavellians choose the utilitarian answer on Submarine, Bystander, Liferaft, Fume, Spelunkers, and Baby the most out of all the groups

• Submarine, Liferaft, and Spelunkers involve killing injured individuals in order to save the rest of a group that you're part of.

• Baby involves smothering a baby in order to have the rest of the group not get heard.

• Bystander and Fumes both involve flipping a switch to kill an individual rather than a group.

No meaningers choose the utilitarian answer on surgery and footbridge almost as much as psychopaths. Maybe they're more familiar with those questions, and as a result became no-meaningers?

The actual participants in the study were responding to fictional dilemmas as well; why should we assume that LW readers would "actually not do it" and the participants would?

One implication of adopting a utilitarian framework as a normative standard in the psychological study of morality is the inevitable conclusion that the vast majority of people are often morally wrong. For instance, when presented with Thomson’s footbridge dilemma, as many as 90% of people reject the utilitarian response (Mikhail, 2007). Many philosophers have also rejected utilitarianism, arguing that it is inadequate in important, morally meaningful ways, and that it presents an especially impoverished view of humans as ‘‘locations of utilities [and nothing more]. . .’’ and that ‘‘persons do not count as individuals. . . any more than individual petrol tanks do in the analysis of the national consumption of petroleum’’ (Sen & Williams, 1982, p. 4). For those who endorse utilitarianism, the ubiquitous discomfort toward its conclusions points to the pessimistic possibility that human moral judgment is even more prone to error than many other forms of judgment, and that attempting to improve the quality of moral judgment will be a steep uphill battle. Before drawing those conclusions, it might prove useful to investigate individuals who are more likely to endorse utilitarian solutions and perhaps use them as a psychological prototype of the ‘‘optimal’’ moral judge. What do those 10% of people who are comfortable with the utilitarian solution to the footbridge dilemma look like? Might these utilitarians have other psychological characteristics in common? Recently, consistent with the view that rational individuals are more likely to endorse utilitarianism (e.g., Greene et al., 2001), a variety of researchers have shown that individuals with higher working memory capacity and those who are more deliberative thinkers are, indeed, more likely to approve of utilitarian solutions (Bartels, 2008; Feltz & Cokely, 2008; Moore, Clark, & Kane, 2008). In fact, one well-defined group of utilitarians likely shares these characteristics as well—the subset of philosophers and behavioral scientists who have concluded that utilitarianism is the proper normative ethical theory.

This seems a reasonable cause for further investigation. And leads me to wonder, what is more likley, that 90% of people are in a very "don't believe your lying eyes" way wrong about the interpretation of their morality or that 10% of people actually have genuinely different moral intuitions on a particular set of issues? What if philosophers and cognitive scientists and psychopaths just have values that on reflection drift in different ways than other groups or each other (just because they agree on some utilitarian actions dosen't mean their systematized ethical frameworks are similar on other dimensions). Of course as Vladimir_M points out how one chooses to signal about moral issues and how one actually respond are two different things.

But could it be that perhaps society, rather than experiencing something fitting our accepted grand tale of moral progress (hastened by enlightened elites throughout history), is rather just rationalizing experiencing moral change that reflects raw demographic shifts, economic conditions and the fickle fashions of those in positions of authority on matters of moral arbitration and/or power? Ah, but that robs me of a comforting future with values that are just my own values extrapolated and "fixed", best not think of this too much then.

Yvain said:

You can end up utilitarian either because you're a psychopath and don't have the special moral module - in which case you default to general purpose reasoning - or because you're very philosophical and have a specific preference for determining moral questions by the same logic with which you determine everything else, thus deliberately overruling the special moral module.

I participate in utilitarian forum, and from that experience I would add to the quote above by saying that there are some people who encountered emotional arguments about "painism" or "speciesism" (e.g. arguments from Singer; Ryder, and the like) and followed those arguments to utilitarianism. I would expect that there are few people in this category as a percentage of the total population (in part because few people seriously study ethics of any kind and fewer still find their way to that end).

Maybe this was accounted for successfully, but I didn't see it: We don't know that anyone who took part in the study is actually a psychopath. We only know that some participants scored relatively high on this measure of psychopathy. But using a sliding scale measure means that lots of psychological conditions will come up as a higher than average psychopathy score. Autism would score higher than average on a sliding scale measure of psychopathy.

A possible way to look at this is that its just one consequence of neurodiversity.

Most people share a set of biases towards the answer to an ethical question according to a certain moral system, thus only the most rational, intelligent or those who devote the most time to pondering such questions are likley to overcome this bias.

Psychopaths have a different set of biases, so it dosen't take above average rationality to see the "right" answers according to a moral framework on some issues where "normal" people have a very hard time considering things dispassionately.

Note: Seeing the "right" answer according to a moral framework/ethical system and choosing to answer in a manner consistent with this on a poll or when questioned dosen't necessarily mean one embraces it as his own. Since a variant of utilitarianism is perhaps the default implicit framework of modern society, respondents may may just be trying to model it so as to mimic proper responses in order to fit in or signal the right affiliations. This seems especially plausible for highly functional psychopaths. In which case they may be failing because they don't really understand what it is like to think with those biases in place and don't really know in which direction they are likley to shift typical answers, something a rationalist psychopath would strive pretty hard to take into account.

The cynical economist's position would be that if utilitarianism leads to good results, and being antisocial leads to utilitarianism, then that is a positive side to being antisocial. For example, English social theories, which have lead to the most progressive societies, is intuitively utilitarian. Only valid to a certain extent, of course, but you might say that if you want to live in a progressive society, then you should be slightly antisocial.

I would also like to know whether this definition of "antisocial" covers the Buddha as well. Moreover, might not having non-mainstream tastes or opinions also be correlated with "antisocial" behavior?

But this is entirely irrelevant to the correctness or incorrectness of utilitarian positions. Tremble all you like, but do the right thing.

Of course, what people say they would do in situations of this sort is usually determined by signaling rather than a realistic appraisal. Kind and philosophical utilitarians of the sort one meets on LW would be extremely unlikely to act in practice according to the implications of their favored theories in real-life "sacrificial" situations, so their views are by themselves not strong evidence of antisocial personality traits.

The study seems to target the category of people who answer like utilitarians do, rather than "real utilitarians" defined in any way, so the study seems to directly challenge this statement. I thought one conclusion was that the advocates of utilitarianism are more likely to be antisocial in certain ways, regardless of how they would act when faced with a trolley problem, which was something not measured here.

Pardon me, but this seems to have little to nothing to do with whether utilitarianism should be considered a superior moral framework or not (if this has never been the point I apologize). If anything the article seems to lend evidence to the claim that given certain circumstances psychopaths tend to be more moral than the average individual, why stigmatizing a mental disorder and not its consequences is still tolerated in a society that seems to ostensibly have developed neural imaging is also up for debate.

these approaches lead to the counterintuitive conclusion

Counter-intuitiveness is not a property of the conclusion alone. Surprise does have an important role in learning, because otherwise one may rationalize and modify a theory being tested to fit the facts discovered, so a good way to test a theory's informativeness is to set predictions beforehand and notice one's surprise whenever they don't pan out.

However, experiments are never tests of a single hypothesis but of complexes of hypotheses. A problem with testing a theory's predictions to evaluate the theory is that one may make terrible predictions; the strength of the predictions is not a test of the theory alone but of the tester's ability at extrapolating from a theory.

E.g.: I have several times encountered the argument, "If evolution is true, then why do scientists wear clothes?!" The idea is that by wearing clothes scientists admit to weaknesses of the bare skin design, and evolutionary theory would never predict less furry creatures, creatures who would sometimes be well served by clothing, to evolve from furry creatures. That's a really stupid thing to think, and the conclusion one may draw from noticing surprise that scientists believe in evolution and wear clothes is not that there is a problem with the theory, but with the predictor's extrapolation from the theory.

Evolution is not disproved by scientists wearing clothes. That scientists wear clothes is not even the most infinitesimally small theoretical evidence against evolution.

Obviously, I post in hindsight. But "Participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of Psychopathy, machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness...a set of psychological characteristics that many would consider prototypically immoral," i.e. "Participants who were abnormally likely to endorse unpopular moral calculations were aneurotypical in ways society labels as bad, and they were more willing to defy societal conventions and trust their own moral judgement rather than society's, and/or ignore society's mores for personal gain." Surprise?

I vaguely recall reading about a study showing that most people were better at estimating their grocery bill when they abstractly estimated as they went along than when they tried to keep track of dollars and cents in their heads. Suppose this is true, pretend that it was well know and that the workings of cash registers were a total mystery.

One might find that those more adept at calculating would be less likely to take approximations as representing objective truths, and less likely to respect seeing $2.95 or $2.99 and $3.00 as being qualitatively the same, even though all three numbers are of the same type - amounts that are "threeish dollars".

Would the usually superior results of the approximaters' models show that the true operation of the registers most resembles converting prices into approximations and arriving at a larger number in a formula no one understood but was approximately addition, and then adding a bit for tax and translating the result into a dollar amount? Would the counters who laboriously try to add the prices and carry the numbers and then calculate the tax by multiplying (rather than "adding a bit" as the good approximating models do - they never accidentally forget to move a decimal point) be obviously wrong, by having the only models that fail catastrophically, in addition to their doing worse on average?

The counters might claim that counting best represents the type of thing cash registers do, and present contrived thought experiments like a person buying two items, one for $1.60 and the other for $2.80, with a 7.5% tax rate. Obviously, no experiment can be run with a cash register as such prices are never found in practice; counters say ($1.60+$2.80)*1.075=$4.73, while approximaters say $1.60 is the type of thing that is one-and-a-halfish-dollars (a fringe position, still noteworthy, is that it is the type of thing that is twoish dollars), $2.80 is the type of thing that is threeish dollars, add them together to get four-and-a-halfish dollars, and a little bit more than four-and-a-halfish dollars is the price of that basket of goods: "$4.75".

The consonance of "$4.75" and not "$4.73" to apes counting in base ten is not relevant to unraveling the secrets of the cash register, or much else, as interesting as it is in its own right. Likewise a strong emotional aversion to pushing the fat man tells us about the psychology of someone, not the rightness of pushing the fat man (which is dependent on all facts, including of course the psychology of each person).

To see what utilitarians would actually do, observe what happens when a group with a utilitarian ideology gets unchecked political power.

I pretty regularly hear that Stalin or Ho or Tito's "authoritarianism", was regrettably necessary in order to achieve economic development, which is just the same argument that "socialism needs killing fields", only made by a socialist instead of a supporter of capitalism

Well this is splendid! I should have a far easier time concealing myself and my intentions here than on nearly any other venue.