Open AccessMortality salience and the Trolley Problem in Medical Students
Author(s) -
Gabriel Andrade,
María J. Redondo,
Deepali Razdan
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
romanian journal of applied psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.102
H-Index - 1
eISSN - 2392-845X
pISSN - 2392-8441
DOI - 10.24913/rjap.20.2.03
Subject(s) - mortality salience , terror management theory , salience (neuroscience) , psychology , death anxiety , social psychology , anxiety , clinical psychology , developmental psychology , cognitive psychology , psychiatry
Terror Management Theory predicts that when subjects are exposed to mortality salience (i.e. they are reminded of their death), they develop higher levels of anxiety and have stronger holdings for their cultural worldviews. Mortality salience also makes subjects more cautious in many daily activities. These premises lead to the hypothesis that, under mortality salience, subjects are more deontological in their moral judgments. To test this hypothesis, medical students from a Caribbean school were presented with two classical versions of the Trolley Problem. Subjects were placed in two groups, on the basis of a computer random generator. One group was not exposed to mortality salience, the other group was. Results came out showing that being under mortality salience does not significantly increase the probability that subjects have a deontological approach to ethics.