Thesis on Morality & Autism Spectrum Disorders

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Hello everyone,

I'm doing my thesis on morality and autism spectrum disorders and I am looking for any willing participants to take my quick 10 to 20 minute online survey. I really appreciate anyone who is willing to participate.

The survey link is posted at the bottom after the following information:

I am an undergraduate student at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. My name is Courtney Clark and I can be contacted at [email protected].
As a part of my undergraduate thesis project for the course HH/PSYC4170, I am working on a study whereby I need to collect information on how individuals with autism spectrum disorders make moral judgements in response to moral dilemmas. I am therefore asking if you would agree to participate in my research by answering a questionnaire.

The questionnaire has 38 questions and should take about 20 minutes to complete.

You do not have to participate at all, or, even if you agree now, you can terminate your participation at any time without prejudice. You also do not have to answer individual questions you don’t want to answer. Your name and personal information is in no way attached to this survey and I will ensure that your participation remains confidential.

I can tell you that your response may be included in the paper I will write at the conclusion of this assignment; however, your responses would be anonymous and nobody could connect your responses with you as an individual.

A benefit you may experience by participating in this study is greater knowledge of your perceptions/feelings towards moral dilemmas.

By participating in this study, you risk being upset or made uncomfortable by the questions asked.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me at [email protected] or my professor, Alistair Mapp at [email protected].


https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/7QYWR8F


Thank you!

Courtney

I'm sorry, but the first few questions turned my stomach. Completing the survey is out of the question. Imagining myself in situations where someone dies no matter what I do is extremely distressing, especially when I have to choose who dies.

Good luck with your thesis.

Well, I did it, but as often is the case with questionnaires, I got a strong feeling that my answers were likely to be misleading. For the moral dilemmas, the logical choice is obvious, but who knows what they would actually do in real life? I sure don't. I had a problem with the word "community" as I don't know if that means district, neighbourhood, or the sum total of all the people I'm emotionally closest to. I assumed neighbourhood.

I did it but answered no to all the questions. I found it quite disturbing.

I did it.

I also assumed neighborhood for community.

So, what did you find out?

Answered no to all but the baby smothering question. Since everybody including the baby gets it if the soldiers discover you, can't see any other alternative.

I'm really curious about the thesis and what your hypothesis is. I guess you can't tell us that prior to collecting data...

I can't really decide on some of the questions. In the first, I thought about flipping the switch that would kill the one worker but would save five others, my reasoning being to minimise the loss of life, people will die either way but there'll only one life lost rather than five.

The second one asked whether you would push an innocent bystander in front of a train to stop it from killing five workers. While logically, you can use the same reasoning to justify it as the first question, it just feels like I'd be murdering the innocent bystander and I can't bring myself to choose that option. These questions are quite distressing, so I don't think that I can complete the questionnaire.

[quote="progasp]
Answered no to all but the baby smothering question. Since everybody including the baby gets it if the soldiers discover you, can't see any other alternative.[/quote]

Personally I feel nothing is more evil than killing a child. I'd never be able to live with myself. I'd rather be killed than be apart of killing, especially a child.

I felt the same way. I can flip a switch to minimize the loss of life, but I can't push an innocent bystander in the way of the train. Or toss some one off a boat. And definitely can't kill a baby. I'd rather die than harm a child.

We probably should have put a SPOILER ALERT after the first post. If we work out what the OP is looking for, it might well distort our responses, so I recommend doing the questionnaire before reading on.


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Here's a HD movie that has a nice visual demo of the trolley problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rs_ELR1V1pQ

I think one take-home message from the movie is that decisions based on utilitarian moral principles can be bad ones. Interestingly, there's an Aspie who is sacrificed so that NTs might live.

Here's a fairly in-depth article on the trolley problem and some of its variants:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

It seems that there's normally strong resistance to the idea of actually pushing the fat man under the trolley. I'm sure I've read that we're supposed to be more mathematical than emotional when it comes to moral choices. So the questionnaire results look as if they'll find that out - each successive variant of the trolley problem provides a stronger, emotional appeal to our tendermindedness - "yes but I'm not going to smother a baby." I felt worried about being unable to respond to the last few questions of that type, until I read that the rest of the world would also have a lot of trouble saving those 4 lives. I'd have preferred the wording to have been "do you think it would be the right thing to do, yes, no, or don't know?" rather than "would you do it or not?"

The questions are nonsense. I have heard these preposterous hypotheticals before and they always seem equally stupid. I can't join in the game the ethicists seem to playing: Let's pretend this ridiculous idea is somehow real. No.

Question 1 is the one about throwing the switch to divert a train so you save 5 by killing 1...

My answer: I don't believe in this scenario. I understand that it's a thought experiment, but real life is not like this. I don't have access to the point switches in local rail systems. I wouldn't know what they did if I did have access. If I scaled down to the tracks near Penn Station, the TSA boys would probably gun me down the minute I started tampering with switches while trains were running. The whole thing is a stupid joke.

Question 2 is the one about stopping a train from killing 5 people by throwing a fat person in front of it. What a load of rubbish! Do we not know even basic Newtonian physics?

My answer: This is a ridiculous question. There is no way the body of any human will stop a train. It's a simple question of physics. When a massive enough object does stop a train, as happened recently in the Bronx and Oxnard, there is often a derailment and catastrophic damage with many injuries and loss of life to people aboard the train. I don't think I would recognize a runaway train if I saw one because I am not a railway engineer. Even if I did, I would never leap to the conclusion that if I pushed a person (no matter how obese) off a bridge in front of the train, this would somehow improve the situation. The entire construct is absurd.

Question 3 is the one about smothering a baby to stop yourself and a group of others (including the baby) from being killed by enemy soldiers.

My answer: I would attempt to keep the baby silent while providing it with air, possibly using my mouth to silence the crying instead of my hand and breathing through my nose and into the baby's mouth to keep it supplied with oxygen.
Again, I don't believe in the hypothetical. If my attempts to provide air for the baby were unsuccessful, then the baby might die, but not because I deliberately "smother the baby" I am more imaginative and less willing to give up than that.

Question 4 supposes a remarkably badly designed hospital. You are a nightwatchman who observes a lab accident that releases toxic fumes into the ventilation system and you have an opportunity to throw a switch to divert the air flow from a room with five patients to a room with one patient... I guess this is not a BSL4 facility, eh?

My answer: Who the hell designed this system that vents into patient areas? instead of faffing about with ventilation switches, I would get busy evacuating the patients. Who knows what other lethal defects are designed into this system by the criminally negligent engineers who built it? I'm a watchman, not an architect! I don't know at this point is going to happen when I start throwing ventilation system switches, but I do know I better get the patients out of harms way, or at least make sure the emergency services, particularly a hazmat team, can clear the building as quickly as possible.

At this point, I give up on this nonsense. I think these questions reveal nothing because the situations are not at all real in my imagination.

I can suspend my disbelief when watching a man in a rubber suit play the baddie in a John Pertwee era Dr. Who, but I cannot believe these situations.

The experimental design is going to exclude people like me because I can't bring myself to accept the definition as provided. Real life isn't like that.

Quick! Show me where the switch is and what will happen when I throw it! <sarcasm>

I noticed almost immediately that the student equated "difficult interpersonal situations" (which implies relationship investment) with "emergency situations" where responders or bystanders have no previous emotional involvement.

It's hard to believe that any responsible thesis supervisor at tertiary level would approve this. The conflation of the two is misleading, ambiguous and invalid. So the conclusions will be invalid too. Don't do this survey.

Last edited by B19 on 26 Feb 2015, 2:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The situations presented are all implausible in the extreme. They are hypotheticals which have no meaning in the "real world."

Adamentium was eloquent in his reasoning, and illustrative as well (especially within the choo-choo train post).

True. I'm very glad it isn't. I like your solution of keeping the baby quiet without killing it. The movie I linked to has a lot to say that would echo your opinion here.

What intrigues me is that I've felt that same annoyance as you have with just about every questionnaire I've filled in. The AQ test asks "have people accused you of being rude?" Logical answer, no. Real answer, I don't recall any such complaints, but I don't get around much, and I think people have probably often thought me rude, though it's hard to know if that's been more frequent than for a neurotypical.

I know of one guy who was diagnosed as oppositional-defiant because he kept making such responses to questions. But I think it's just that we're being straight, these things really make no sense to us.

I suspect there's some value in the questionnaires that is hard for us to see. Tests are often performed under laboratory conditions, with highly-refined parameters you'd never be able to reproduce in real life. It's a serious limitation, but that doesn't mean they won't tell us anything useful. When I couldn't answer the baby-killing question etc., I thought I was letting the test down, but my failure to choose was an answer.