According to Forbes, a new study led by psychologist and philosopher Dr. Dries H. Bostyn, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, took the classic “trolley problem” out of the classroom and into a lab with real consequences. Instead of a hypothetical lever, participants had to choose whether to allow two people to receive a painful but safe electric shock, or to actively divert the shock to just one person. Crucially, while outcomes were randomized to prevent guilt, participants fully believed their choices were real during the experiment. The findings were striking: people’s hypothetical answers only moderately predicted their real-life choices, and nearly a third of participants changed their decision when faced with the same dilemma a second time. The research fundamentally challenges how we think about morality, prediction, and our own future behavior.
Why Hypotheticals Fail Us
Here’s the thing about those late-night philosophy debates: they’re clean. Too clean. The trolley problem strips away everything that makes us human. It’s just numbers on a track. But in Dr. Bostyn’s lab, it wasn’t numbers. It was people. And that changes everything.
When you’re just thinking abstractly, you can be a cold, utilitarian calculator. You can confidently say, “Yeah, I’d pull the lever to minimize harm.” But in front of you is a real person who looks nervous, or someone who seems tough but has a shaky voice. Maybe one person reminds you of your friend. Your brain can’t help but absorb all that data. As Bostyn told Forbes, in hypotheticals we “reason about faceless strangers.” In reality, we respond to humans with humanity. That’s not a bug in our moral software; it’s the core feature.
The Illusion Of Certainty
This is where it gets personal. Many participants walked into the lab certain of what they’d do. And then they surprised themselves. They hesitated. They switched their answers the second time around, not just to minimize pain, but sometimes in a weird attempt to be “fair” and spread the harm around.
So what does that say about you? About all those times you’ve rehearsated a difficult conversation in your head or vowed exactly how you’d act in a crisis? Basically, you’re probably wrong. The version of you calmly planning in the shower is not the version who will feel the heat of the moment, the pressure of someone’s gaze, or the gut-punch of empathy. We overestimate our future control because hypotheticals, by design, have zero stakes. As Bostyn puts it, why would you make the ‘hard’ choice when your choice has no impact?
What This Means For Real Life
This isn’t just about ethics class. It’s about how we judge ourselves and everyone else. We beat ourselves up for not following through on a plan we made in a calm state. We call others hypocrites when they act differently under real pressure than they said they would in theory. But this research suggests that’s a brutal oversimplification.
Our hypothetical selves have never carried the weight that our real selves do. Morality isn’t a single snapshot decision; it’s sequential. It has memory. We’re shaped by what just happened and what we think comes next. Life can’t be mastered by endless mental rehearsal because reality refuses to freeze time and remove context. The gap between who we think we’ll be and who we become in the moment isn’t a moral failure. It’s just human.
The Bottom Line
Look, planning isn’t useless. But overthinking and over-planning can give us a dangerous false sense of certainty. We like the idea of being coherent, principled agents. But in truth, we’re messy, relational, and wildly context-sensitive creatures. This study is a powerful reminder that only in hypotheticals can we find true certainty. Reality, by its very nature, can’t offer that. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe understanding that we’re poor predictors of our own behavior is the first step to being a little more forgiving—of ourselves, and of the other flawed humans standing next to us on the track.
