Trolleys, Triage and Covid-19: The Role of Psychological Realism in Sacrificial Dilemmas Kneer, Markus Rodríguez Hannikainen, Ivar Allan Moral judgment Values COVID-19 Utilitarianism Politics The research was supported by a Swiss National Science Foundation grant (PZ00P1_179912, PI Markus Kneer). Data and materials are available on the Open Science Framework at: osf.io/dpsq9/?view_only=54a7c150e03d4d78819b2954cee3a240. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, frontline medical professionals at intensive care units around the world faced gruesome decisions about how to ration life-saving medical resources. These events provided a unique lens through which to understand how the public reasons about real-world dilemmas involving trade-offs between human lives. In three studies (total N = 2298), we examined people’s moral attitudes toward triage of acute coronavirus patients, and found elevated support for utilitarian triage policies. These utilitarian tendencies did not stem from period change in moral attitudes relative to pre-pandemic levels--but rather, from the heightened realism of triage dilemmas. Participants favored utilitarian resolutions of critical care dilemmas when compared to structurally analogous, non-medical dilemmas—and such support was rooted in prosocial dispositions, including empathy and impartial beneficence. Finally, despite abundant evidence of political polarization surrounding Covid-19, moral views about critical care triage differed modestly, if at all, between liberals and conservatives. Taken together, our findings highlight people’s robust support for utilitarian measures in the face of a global public health threat, and illustrate how hypothetical scenarios in moral psychology (e.g. trolley cases) should strive for more experiential and psychological realism, otherwise their results might not generalize to real-world moral dilemmas. 2021-10-04T10:43:17Z 2021-10-04T10:43:17Z 2021-08-02 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Published version: Markus Kneer & Ivar R. Hannikainen (2021) Trolleys, triage and Covid-19: the role of psychological realism in sacrificial dilemmas, Cognition and Emotion, DOI: [10.1080/02699931.2021.1964940] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/70617 10.1080/02699931.2021.1964940 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 3.0 España Routledge