Confronting a moral dilemma in virtual reality: a pilot study

People tend to respond realistically to situations and events in immersive Virtual Reality (VR). Our research exploits this finding to test the hypothesis that the psychology underlying moral judgement is distinct from the psychology that drives moral action. We have conducted an online survey study with 80 respondents on people’s judgments of moral dilemmas. Additionally, we have carried out a pilot study with 36 participants investigating people’s responses when confronted with comparable moral dilemmas in two different types of VR: desktop VR and Immersive VR. We recorded participants’ behavioural responses and post experimental questionnaire data. The results show that in general, participants’ responses in VR were consistent with the patterns obtained from the online survey. However, results also suggest that participants in the Immersive VR condition differed from those in the desktop VR condition in two ways: they 1) experienced more panic and made more mistakes in their immediate action; 2) were more likely to give a utilitarian answer (saving the greatest number of lives) in the post experimental questionnaire. This pilot study provides encouraging evidence for the use of VR in the study of moral psychology, and in particular, for teasing apart the distinction between judgments and actions. They further reveal that although our VR set up only presented abstract human figures, participants had a strong emotional reaction to the dilemma, on both immersive and desktop platforms.