Recent work by David Pizarro at Cornell is shedding light the role that race and ethics play in politics, by asking people to sacrifice the lives of either Tyrone Payton or Chip Ellsworth III. OK, they didn't really have to sacrifice anyone, but each participant in the study was faced with a variation of the classical ethical dilemma called the "trolley problem." The trolley problem asks the question: Would you push someone on to the tracks (and kill them) to stop a trolley holding 100 people from crashing (and killing them all)? The paper (pdf) describes the twist that Pizarro and colleagues put on the trolley question when they asked it to California undergraduates:
Half of the participants received a version of the scenario where the agent could choose to sacrifice an individual named “Tyrone Payton” to save 100 members of the New York Philharmonic, and the other half received a version where the agent could choose to sacrifice “Chip Ellsworth III” to save 100 members of the Harlem Jazz Orchestra.
