Effect of preferences for sexual sadism on utilitarian solving of Ticking-bomb moral dilemmas
Creators: name: Flegr, Jaroslav
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: ticking bomb dilemma
subject: sadism
subject: Sexual preferences
subject: utilitarism
subject: moral dilemma

description: An anonymous electronic questionnaire will be used to collect data for testing the following hypotheses: 1) subjects who report being sexually aroused by sexual sadism sensu lato (by somebody else helplessness, humiliation, or pain) report also a higher tendency for utilitarian solving of ticking-bomb dilemma. 2) This correlation is higher when he or she should personally torture the terrorist or his inoncent partner than when he/she only is expected to order torture. 3) The willingness to torture another person will depend on the sex of the other person and the sexual orientation of the responder (the sex-orientation interaction will be significant.) 4) Being sexually aroused by sexual sadism sensu lato will positively correlate with the Instrumental Harm subscale of the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale questionnaire. The questionnaire will contain several separate questionnaires and cognitive performance tests. In the middle of the questionnaire the responders will be offered the following four versions of the ticking bomb scenario: 1) “You are part of the Counter-Terrorism Unit, legally immune from prosecution for acts within the scope of your profession. An atomic time bomb is planted in the center of Prague. If you could locate it, you would save over a million innocent people from certain death. You have captured a young but important terrorist who knows the information needed to stop the time bomb. It's clear he won't give up the information willingly. Would you be willing to order an enhanced interrogation method (= torture that can leave permanent consequences or even lead to death) if you were absolutely 100% certain that you would get the information that way?” 2) “The situation is similar to the previous one. Again, you are 100% sure to get the information. In this case, however, you have to torture the terrorist yourself. Will you torture?" 3) „The situation is similar to the previous ones. Torture didn't work on the terrorist. But you've also captured a girl with whom the terrorist is madly in love. She doesn't know about his "profession". Would you be willing to give the order to torture this girl so that the terrorist will give up the information needed to save a million innocent Prague residents? Again, you are 100% certain to get the information.“ 4) „The situation is similar to the previous one. Again, you are 100% sure to get the information. In this case, however, you have to torture the girl yourself. Will you torture?" The responders should answer the questions using a 6-items scale anchored with 0-definitively no and 6-definitively yes. After about 150 questions on health, infections, altruism, fairness, disgust, political attitudes, etc, the responders will be asked to respond block of six questions on their sexual life. The block will contain also the following four statements: 1. I am sexually attracted to individuals of the same sex as me. 2. I am sexually attracted to individuals of the opposite sex from me. 3. I am also sexually aroused by my own helplessness, humiliation, or pain. 4. I am also sexually aroused by someone else's helplessness, humiliation, or pain. The responders should express their agreement with the statements using a 6-items scale anchored with 0-definitively no and 6-definitively yes. Stopping rule: The study will run until the end of May 2022 or until we collect data from at least 3000 subjects. If less than 75 homosexual men will be present in the data set, we will continue the data collection to achieve this aim or to the end of September 2022. Primarily, we will analyze the data using a one-tailed partial Kendall test (age and sex controlled). In the post hoc tests, we will analyze data of men and women separately and will search for possible effects of potential confounding variables, such as age, sex, health, etc. The preregistered hypotheses are distinct and independent. Therefore, no correction for multiple tests will be done. In the explorative part of the study we will search for the association of the preference for the utilitarian solution of the Ticking bomb dilemmas and various potentially confounding variables, e.g. political attitudes measured with Political beliefs and values inventory PI34, various kinds of disgust, including Injury disgust, altruism, honesty, intelligence, memory, Machiavellism, Narcism, Psychopathy measured with Short Dark Triad, (SD3), Big 5 personality traits measured with TIPI, etc. We will also search for the effects of priming with positive, negative, and neutral stimuli (remembering positive or negative emotion or words starting with particular characters) on all variables monitored with the questionnaire.