AITA?: A look at the ‘trolley problems’ of today

In place of hypotheticals, people lay out real-life dilemmas, in riveting detail, on platforms such as Reddit. Even social psychologists are tuning in for data.

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A recreation of a popular trolley problem meme.

There’s a lot that’s changed about the “trolley problem”.

These used to be a set of philosophical questions that sociologists examined, and people pondered in their free time, in attempts to decode human motivation and behaviour.

In a common example, a trolley is going down a track. It stands to kill five people. You can make it switch tracks so it kills only one, but that one is someone you love. The answer to “What do you do?” is also the answer to “Who are you, really?”

This thought experiment was first introduced by philosopher Philippa Foot, in an essay on abortion, in 1967.

Our world has since acquired more layers; the cult of the individual has grown stronger; and the internet has altered almost everything, including how we engage in such debates. In one such dramatic shift, the web has taken philosophical debates out of the classroom and lab and thrown them open to the world. The most widely used platform for modern-day “trolley problems” also cuts through the niceties to simply ask: Am I The A**hole?

Posts uploaded to this Reddit thread, over 12 years, have become a riveting body of intricate, intimate information on the moral minutiae of everyday life. Questions include…

* Am I wrong for not going to my sister’s wedding after she called my child “disgusting” in public?

* AITA for giving my wife a written performance review because I’m so tired of her being partial to one of our kids?

* Am I a bad person for swapping my almond milk with regular milk, to prove that my lactose-intolerant roommate was stealing from me?

* Is it my fault that I don’t want to spend all my holidays with my husband’s surly kids?

* Is it wrong to hate my parents for spending my entire inheritance on my sister, who got pregnant at 18?

The AITA subreddit remains the largest such repository, but it is now one of many across social-media platforms. Responses tend to be detailed and laden with emotion too. This vast and growing collection of dilemmas and reactions to dilemmas is now serving as a goldmine for social psychologists.

“It’s a kind of living archive of moral life,” says Daniel Yudkin, director of the civic research initiative Beacon Project, and a visiting scholar in social psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s a rare window into not just what people think is right or wrong, but why.”

Yudkin has been scouring through AITA threads on Reddit for five years, gathering insight on how people deliver judgment and grapple with accountability. His research began as a postdoctoral fellowship, in 2019, and he has since published papers exploring how these online repositories offer a more well-calibrated means of studying modern morality than the hypothetical scenarios still used in labs today.

Even the trolley problem, he argues, is an amusing hypothesis compared to these immediate, real-world challenge, all drawn from a recognisable context.

“AITA posts tend to be complex, emotional, deeply social,” he adds. “They pit loyalty against self-respect, social norms against personal values. They’re not about maximising utility. They are about balancing competing obligations in messy, real relationships.”

Guilt-edged

Using AI to sort r/AITA posts into categories, Yudkin began to empirically analyse them. In a paper published in the journal PNAS Nexus in May, he showed that the individual’s most deeply felt dilemmas tend to involve parents, partners, roommates or friends.

This is a reminder, he says, that “morality isn’t just a set of rules; it’s a way of managing the fragile web of responsibilities we have to the people in our lives.”

Part of his study focused on which issues of morality drew the most negative feedback and the least support. It surprised him, he says, to see how harshly people judge dishonesty. Cheating and lying were condemned even more than intentional harm, his study found. Trust violations hit a particularly deep nerve, he posits, because they undermine the glue that holds relationships and communities together.

Another unexpected finding was that people were surprisingly forgiving when someone failed to meet another’s expectations. Individuals conflicted over whether to prioritise the self over the other were often offered reassurance, with the understanding that what they were really trying to do was take care of two people at once.

Posts from the pandemic years proved particularly poignant. There was, after all, no handbook here. No one had debated these dos and don’ts ahead of time. And, unusually, the cost of a misstep could now be a literal matter of life and death. Questions like “Am I wrong for not visiting my parents at all during lockdown?” reflected new, and deep, moral dilemmas, Yudkin says.

Futures trading

The thing about real-life moral dilemmas, though, is that they were never meant to be played out on the world stage, he points out. To make a private dilemma public can be a dangerous thing, and amid the debate and entertainment, it can be easy to lose sight of that.

“Presenting a version of yourself, and inviting judgment, can bring the unexpected clarity of seeing your conflict through the eyes of strangers. But it can amplify anxiety,” he adds. It can also cause a great deal of inner confusion, given that there is every kind of opinion in a global community.

Meanwhile, Yudkin says, it is interesting to note that the really big moral conundrums aren’t playing out here at all.

The biggest global dilemmas today have a lot in common, in fact, with that original trolley problem. And the way we have been reacting to the biggest of these, the climate crisis, indicates just how clearly we would choose the things we love over the assured destruction of a large population.

Making the right choices in such a situation requires deep empathy for people distant from us not just in space but also in time, Yudkin points out. “And that’s particularly difficult because our brains are wired for immediate relationships — in an imperative that did once help us survive.”

At the same time, he adds, people do care deeply about obligations. “Perhaps if we take the moral questions people are really asking — about fairness, honesty, and care — and bring them into the bigger conversations, we might have a better chance of arriving at the clarity we need.”