Partisanship and the trolley problem: Partisan willingness to sacrifice members of the other party

Abstract

Do partisans view members of the other party as having lower moral status? While research shows that partisans view the out-group quite poorly, we show that affective polarization extends to expressing a willingness to sacrifice an out-partisan’s life. We report the first study to consider partisanship in the classic “trolley problem” in which respondents are asked whether they would sacrifice an individual’s life in order to save the life of five individuals. We explore this issue with a nationally representative survey experiment in the United States, inquiring about politicized variants of the trolley problem case. First, we vary the political affiliations of both the group of five (to be saved by turning the trolley) and the single individual (to be sacrificed by turning the trolley). We find that individuals are less willing to sacrifice a co-partisan for the sake of a group of out-partisans. These findings go beyond earlier work by suggesting that partisans not only hold negative attitudes and judgments toward political out-groups but also they will at least signal approval of differing moral treatment. We take stock of how these results bear on normative questions in democratic theory.