2023-10-26 05:45:35
Life is easier when you don’t think about the consequences of your actions. Image: picture alliance / Westend61
An animal died for a schnitzel and driving is bad for the climate. Psychologists have examined how people prefer to deal with the unpleasant consequences of their actions – and what they expect from them.
In classic social psychology studies, participants were presented with real-life challenges. There was Philipp Zimbardo, who had student volunteers play guards and prisoners in the University basement at Stanford. There was Stanley Milgram, who put his test subjects at the controls of an electric shocker in order to administer supposed electric shocks to other test subjects. Dutton and Aron sent their subjects on a suspension bridge over cliffs and a raging river to show that anxious excitement easily turns into amorous excitement. Although some classic studies have recently raised doubts, it is undeniable that researchers at the time still faced the fullness of human life.
Today, the simplicity of the economic game is very popular in research. The interpersonally exciting and philosophically complex question of whether human altruism primarily serves one’s good reputation, one’s own self-image or actually the well-being of others is then translated not into field research spectacles but into payoff matrices over which the subjects brood with a wavering mouse cursor.
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