Moral psychologists have shown that people’s past moral experiences can affect their subsequent moral decisions. One prominent finding in this line of research is that when people make a judgment about the Trolley dilemma after considering the Footbridge dilemma, they are significantly less likely to decide it is acceptable to redirect a train to save five people. Additionally, this ordering ef...

Debate continues about the ethics of sham surgery controls. The most powerful argument for sham surgery controls is that rigorous experiments are needed to demonstrate safety and efficacy of surgical procedures. Without such experiments, there is danger of adopting worthless procedures in clinical practice. Opponents of sham surgery controls argue that sham surgery constitutes unacceptable viol...

Centuries' worth of cultural stories suggest that self-sacrifice may be a cornerstone of our moral concepts, yet this notion is largely absent from recent theories in moral psychology. For instance, in the footbridge version of the well-known trolley car problem the only way to save five people from a runaway trolley is to push a single man on the tracks. It is explicitly specified that the bys...

Over recent years, researchers have used full-scale motorcycle crash tests in the field of road safety research to simulate different types of crash technique and scenario. This study focuses on the development of laboratory-based motorcycle crash tests. A moveable barrier, designated as a ‘trolley’ in this study, is designed, developed and implemented in a laboratory-based motorcycle crash tes...

This paper presents an anti-sway control for overhead cranes using neural networks. To reduce the sway of a load after positioning to the greatest extent possible, we construct a trajectory for the position of the trolley. Radial basis function networks (RBFNs) are employed to generate the desired trolley position. Thereafter, a particle swarm optimization (PSO) is used as a learning algorithm ...

Debate continues about the ethics of sham surgery controls. The most powerful argument for sham surgery controls is that rigorous experiments are needed to demonstrate safety and efficacy of surgical procedures. Without such experiments, there is danger of adopting worthless procedures in clinical practice. Opponents of sham surgery controls argue that sham surgery constitutes unacceptable viol...

As automated vehicles receive more attention from the media, there has been an equivalent increase in the coverage of the ethical choices a vehicle may be forced to make in certain crash situations with no clear safe outcome. Much of this coverage has focused on a philosophical thought experiment known as the “trolley problem,” and substituting an automated vehicle for the trolley and the car's...

Shopping in the real world is becoming an increasingly interactive experience as stores integrate various technologies to support shoppers. Based on an empirical study of supermarket shoppers, the authors designed a mobile context-aware system called the Context-Aware Shopping Trolley (CAST). The purpose of CAST is to support shopping in supermarkets through context-awareness and acquiring user...

Previous studies on moral judgment have assumed that the trolley and footbridge dilemmas (Thomson, 1985) reflect utilitarian and deontologist thinking, respectively. However, on the basis of the “intervention myopia” hypothesis (Waldmann & Dieterich, 2007) and recent findings in analyses of moral dilemmas (Nakamura, 2011), the current study led a somewhat paradoxical prediction: An effect of th...