Programming Tasks Impact Responses to Moral Dilemmas for Novice Programmers

We examine if performing a programming task alters a decision maker’s response to a well-known moral dilemma: the trolley problem. In the problem, the decision maker must choose between inaction that sacrifices multiple lives or a deliberate action that changes the course of events and sacrifices a different life. We argue that computer programming requires structured, rule-based cognition, resulting in a deliberative mindset. This mindset leads decision makers to prefer sacrificing a single life to save multiple lives, known as the utilitarian choice to the moral dilemma. Through a series of experiments, we find that performing a programming task (i) increases the prevalence of utilitarian choices on the trolley problem and (ii) this shift is exclusive to novice programmers. We validate this effect with more complex programming tasks. We examine two interventions (a simple nudge and a time delay between programming and the moral dilemma) that mitigate this effect. These results contribute to our understanding of how performing programming tasks impact ethical decision making. We discuss the implications of our results for organizations and society.