If you believe in producing the greatest happiness for the greatest number, then you might also be a little bit psychopathic—at least according to a recent Business School study.
Business School professor Daniel Bartels, along with David Pizarro from Cornell, published a study this summer examining the personalities of people who adhere to the ethical theory of utilitarianism—essentially, people who believe that the good is that which makes the most people the happiest. Bartels found that utilitarians are more likely to manipulate others to achieve their own ends, more likely to view life as basically meaningless, and more likely to be emotionally callous and take pleasure in violence.
From a utilitarian perspective, “when you’re trying to make a decision about who gets harmed … what matters is the number of people that are alive at the end of your action,” Bartels said.
To determine whether a person is utilitarian, researchers often pose the classic thought experiment known as the trolley problem. In one version of the problem, you are standing on a footbridge above the path of a runaway trolley. If you do nothing, the trolley will strike and kill five people in its path, but if you push a single large man off the footbridge onto the tracks, he will die but stop the trolley in its tracks. Utilitarians are people who say that they would push the man, killing him but saving five others.
Previous studies have found that utilitarians may make up about 10 percent of the population and that they can be more rational and deliberative than others. Bartels said that now, population is also more likely be Machiavellian, nihilistic, and psychopathic.
Bartels emphasized that his study does not debunk utilitarianism as a moral theory. “It’s not the case that we think that, for example, utilitarian philosophers are psychopaths,” he said.
Bartels said he intended the research as a response to some researchers who have taken utilitarianism as the correct moral theory and have adopted it as the standard for evaluating individual’s moral judgments. Studies would assume “that people who give utilitarian responses are smart, and aren’t making errors, and people who are saying … ‘No, don’t kill the guy,’ are actually wrong,” he said.
“Psychologists went beyond … saying what people did, to actually making judgments about people’s judgments,” Bartels added.
Bartels said his research suggests that psychologists should be more careful when evaluating morality. The people who give the utilitarian response to the trolley problem are not necessarily morally superior, he said—they might be willing to throw the man off the bridge because of strong philosophical convictions or simply because of their callous indifference to human life.
“Current techniques are not sensitive enough to pick up the difference between somebody who really, really cares, and someone who doesn’t care at all,” Bartels said.
As for the suggestion that the greatest happiness might be served by entrusting authority to the callous and manipulative, Bartels isn’t sure.
“There probably are cases, extreme circumstances, in which it takes people who are able to sort of displace themselves, take themselves out of the immediate emotional context to reason through things,” he said. “As a general matter, I don’t know where that begins and ends.”
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