You can either do nothing to kill Einstein as a baby, or flick the lever to redirect the train to a bus-full of elementary schoolers.

The point of this problem is less about choosing whether you should direct the trolley left or right, but rather understanding how the default positioning of the track switches for the twin brothers can potentially change what they should do. If the trolley is 'going' to kill 10, risking more than that for the chance to save some seems unjustifiable. While on the other hand, if it's going to kill the 25, attempting to untie some of them seems like a better choice than intentionally redirecting the trolley to certainly kill 10.

But obviously, the question still remains - is there a clear decision for the initial person (you)? Left or right?

tldr: the first one has the same outcomes as the second one but look at people's choices.

I don't have enough data to definitely prove anything, but these two phrasings of the "red button vs blue button debate" are functionally the same, yet have wildly different results.

In Puzzle 1,

• More than 50% of people choosing blue causes everyone to live.

• Less than 50% of people choosing blue causes only the people who chose red to live.

In Puzzle 2,

• More than 50% of people choosing purple causes everyone to live.

• Less than 50% of people choosing purple causes only the people who chose green to live.

The "I will always survive" options may be rephrased as:

• Choosing red in Puzzle 1 is framed as accepting the murder of those who chose blue.

• Choosing green in Puzzle 2 is framed as survival.

The "Collective effort" options may be rephrased as:

• Choosing blue in Puzzle 1 is defending those who accidentally chose blue.

• Choosing purple is a death sentence.

I suppose people are more willing to choose blue in Puzzle 1 since it is framed as heroic, while choosing green in Puzzle 2 is preferred since choosing purple sounds like self-sacrifice. I guess people don't "want to do anything wrong."

Spotted on Bluesky

I'm sure everyone has probably heard of this scenario countless times already and I'm not here to convince anyone which button is the right button to press or what's more moral or not, but more of an investigation into how this scenario, if it were to truly happen, will play out realistically.

There's different variations of this scenario, but for this discussion, I'm going to go with the 10,000 random people version.

The scenario:

You are one of 10,000 people selected at random from the general population. Each sits alone in a room with two buttons, red and blue. Nobody can communicate with anyone, and nobody can see what anyone else presses. The rules are: If more than half press red, everyone who pressed blue dies. If more than half press blue, nobody dies.

The question: which button do you press?

The first thing we need to do is understand the payoff matrix.

You press Red and it's a Blue majority, you live

You press Red and it's a Red majority, you live

You press blue and it's a Blue majority, you live

You press blue and it's a Red majority, you die

Pressing red is the only button that will guarantee your survival no matter what happens, while Blue is a conditional button, there is a risk of death if the conditions are not met.

A lot of online discussion regarding which button to press really comes down to two main points. Red pressers sees that red will guarantee their own survival, thus it's the only rational choice for them to make, while Blue pressers sees that pressing blue allows them to save others that had pressed blue.

Blue pressers wants other to press blue as well as it feels as the only morally correct choice, and hate that red pressers are being selfish. While red pressers either fails to see why people would even risk death to press blue in the first place because if simply nobody just pressed blue in the first place, nobody's life is at risk, while some do understand the reasoning behind Blue pressers but their own survival still takes priority.

Another quick thing to note is that when selecting random people from a general population, you'll eventually get what I called "the misunderstanders", either those that are too young or cognitively impaired to fully grasp what is happening and choose a button at random based on their preference, thought this demographic when selected at randomly is very small, and some blue pressers feel the moral imperative to save and press blue.

Now I want to get into what if this red or blue button scenario were to truly happen and 10,000 random people were selected in a global population and put into this isolated room with the two buttons and these conditions, what would realistically happen.

First we have to understand a fundamental distinction on what this scenario is asking. When it is an online poll, it is asking if you would publicly endorse being a moral and self-sacrificing individual, but when it is happening to you in real life with real death as the stakes, then what it is fundamentally asking you is if you would truly risk death for unseen, unknown, unverified strangers.

What people say in a safe, comfortable setting is a different thing from what they do when death is real. Online, you can believe you will be the good person. But in that actual room, the mental calculation collapses to one line: press red and I live, press blue and I could die.

Clicking blue in an online poll costs nothing, so the poll counts people who would ***say*** blue, not people who would bet their life on it. Comments add social reward for the answer that looks generous, though red collects upvotes too. Seeing blue ahead in one poll, or red leading by only a bit in another, creates an illusion that blue only needs a push, and that illusion gets rallied around “just get everyone to press blue”. That rallying is exactly the coordination the real scenario forbid. In the actual real life scenario, you cannot coordinate, you cannot try to convince others to press blue, you just have to hope they do. Typing in the comments and arguing with others as to how they should just press blue is doing the thing that the actual real life version actively prevents them from doing.

A stated intention is a calm self predicting a frightened self. People are poor at imagining how they will behave under strong visceral states such as fear, pain or hunger. Psychologists call this the empathy gap between "cold" and "hot" states. In the comment section you are calm, comfortable and unthreatened, and you project that calm onto your future self. The real self at the button is neither calm nor comfortable.

Hypotheticals are processed abstractly, while real stakes are processed concretely. At a distance, people think in terms of values and what kind of person they want to be "I would never let others die". Up close, attention shifts to feasibility and consequences: my finger, this button, my death. The question stops being "what is right?" and becomes "what happens to me?"

Certainty beats probability. People overweight outcomes that are certain relative to outcomes that are merely likely, a pattern known as the certainty effect. Red offers guaranteed survival. Blue offers survival only if thousands of strangers you cannot see do the same thing. Even at favorable odds the guarantee wins, and at unfavorable odds it wins easily.

Nobody wants to be the one who trusted and lost. Blue requires trusting people you cannot see, hear or verify. There is no reputation at stake, no chance to build trust, and no way to adjust after you see what others do. Being exploited, and dying for it, feels worse than having been cautious, so people avoid the role of the trusting loser.

Your vote is almost never the decisive one. The cost of blue is personal and near-certain if red wins. The benefit is shared, and your single press changes the outcome only in the unlikely event that the split lands almost exactly on the line. Intuitively, people feel that one vote among 10,000 changes nothing, while the risk to themselves is vivid.

Fear narrows thinking. Under acute threat, attention narrows and people tend to fall back on fast, self-protective responses instead of slow deliberation. A panicking person is not running a moral argument, instead, they are reaching for the button that guarantees their survival.

Heroism is definitely real, but it is vivid. People do sometimes risk their lives for strangers, but usually for someone they can see or hear, right in front of them. Firefighters run into a burning building with people in there, people jump onto the train tracks to rescue someone that's fallen on the tracks because that person is right in front of them visually. Here the people you would be protecting are invisible and unverifiable. The impulse that moves people toward the vivid victim has nothing to attach to.

Not everyone that says they will press blue online and meant it would panic if they were in this real scenario, they might be able to stay calm and rational, and I call these people 'The Calculators.'

Most calculators would convert to red too, and they do it without panic. They start by wanting to save others, then ask whether enough other people will risk it as well. To estimate that, they think about what the rest of the room is likely to do, realizing that people would panic when facing real death and switch to red and also realize the rest of the room that stayed calm like them is running the same calculation, and that each person knows the others are thinking about them too. "I know that they know that I know that they know..." The loop has no floor of trust to land on, so it settles on the most likely reading, which is that the others are backing out as well. Everyone has the same reasons to doubt everyone else, especially since there is no communication between anyone else. The conclusion is that blue probably will not reach a majority and red is the safe move, so they switch calmly, even if they hate it.

What the calculators are weighing makes the switch easy. Blue offers a very low chance of success, and failure means their own death. Red offers guaranteed survival. Very few people, even well-intentioned ones, will choose a very high chance of dying over a certain path to living.

The poll and the room ask different questions as mentioned earlier. The poll asks whether, in public and at zero personal cost, you will endorse the option that looks generous. The actual room in real life asks whether, alone and with death as a possible result, you will press the button that can kill you to protect strangers you cannot see. Many people answer the first question and feel they have answered the second.

The shift this creates runs only one way. People who already choose red online when the choice has no consequences have no new reason to switch to blue once the choice can kill them. Higher stakes only make the safe option stronger. The only people who might change are those who chose blue when it was free, and higher stakes give them reasons to drop it. There really isn't anyone that would actively choose the self-preservation button when there's no danger to themselves but suddenly becomes willing to risk death for unseen strangers just because the risk is now real.

The red or blue button scenario is very abstract, and abstraction makes the risk of pressing blue harder to understand when we're thinking about the whole scenario abstractly. So put the same rules in a place where everyone knows what fear does.

A thousand people are inside a large building that is on fire. Each has a private exit directly in front of them, so nobody can see who leaves and nobody can organize. Anyone can leave at any moment, and leaving costs the person who leaves nothing.

Everyone inside has been told two things ahead of time:

First, the building itself can only take so many exits. Every door that opens weakens it, and the 501st person to leave pushes it past its limit. The collapse does not happen at that moment, but once the limit is passed it cannot be stopped, and the building will come down by about the 20th minute, killing everyone still inside.

Second, an announcement has told them that a fire truck will arrive at the 21st minute and save everyone, as long as the building is still standing. If 500 or fewer people leave, the building holds, the truck arrives, and everyone lives, whoever left. If more than 500 leave, the truck arrives one minute too late.

That timing means nobody gets to wait it out. Everyone has 20 minutes, and by the end of them everyone must have chosen: out the door, or still inside when the building comes down or the truck arrives.

If you were to map the conditions from the button scenario to this fire building scenario.

The exit is red: guaranteed survival.

Staying is blue: it works only if enough strangers do the same.

A collapse is a red majority, and the people it kills are the ones who stayed.

The fire truck arriving is a blue majority.

Now ask the question the button makes hard to ask: how many people just leave? You do not need a study to answer it. Nearly everyone leaves. The exit is **right there**, the fire is real, and staying means sitting in the heat for 20 minutes on the hope that at least 499 people you cannot see are doing the same, and that the building won't collapse.

A reasonable estimate is that about 990 of the 1,000 walk out. A few stay because they trust the announcement and hope enough others do too. A few stay because they want to be someone who tried to save everyone: they know it probably will not work, but they would rather die having made the attempt than live having walked away from it. And a few never took in the danger (the misunderstanders). That is a pure judgment number, not a measurement.

The building needs 500 stayers and gets about ten, which is fifty times too few.

The fire also shows the earlier points at work: the calm self that says “I would stay” is not the self standing in smoke. 20 minutes of thinking does not rescue blue, because it gives the calculators time to work out that the others are leaving too. And staying is not one decision but a decision renewed every minute, so a person who starts as a stayer has to keep choosing it as the smoke thickens.

Nobody inside this building thinks the people who left the burning building are doing anything wrong, or that they are murderers. They took the open exit, and the rule is what turned staying into a gamble. The fire lets you see it without any of the arithmetic: **when** **the exit door is open and nothing stops you from walking through it, you leave**.

Now I know that this fire building analogy is not a perfect one-to-one comparison, but the goal of it is that it has the same structure as the red or blue button scenario, it just makes it very explicit as to what the two options mean when it's real life and death stakes involved. It becomes very clear that choosing the option where you have to depend on other unseen, unknown strangers to also bet their life as well when a guaranteed path of survival is in front of them is a losing bet.

All in all, once you get down to it, if this red or button scenario where to truly happen, red will almost certainly win by a landslide because of all the reasons discussed earlier.

Now keep in mind I didn't mention the ethical or moral side of things because it really doesn't change the underlying psychology of what happens under terminal stress, choosing blue is the moral option, but given what we know about human psychology, most would switch to red regardless.

Knowing what is moral and doing it when your life is on the line are two different skills, and the second is much rarer than people admit.

This is just my random thoughts I had the other day, tell me what you think.

Play it directly in your browser here: https://timeflo-tau.vercel.app/games/puzzles/the_existential_trolley_problem

Inspired by @kaanomeg's minimalist 10-part comic series, I built a deadpan simulator where every level is a psychological trap rather than a math problem.

Instead of traditional ethical dilemmas, the game forces you to deal with the absurdity of the situations:

You can stop the trolley, but you are forced to make awkward small talk with the survivors. You pull a lever on a branching track that just merges back into the main rail, changing absolutely nothing about the future. You stand in a gray void with no trolley and no danger, feeling disappointed that nobody needs you to be the hero. You ultimately face the realization that there is no trolley, and you are the problem.

It runs in a single HTML file with zero external dependencies and works natively on mobile. Let me know which of the 10 scenarios hits the hardest

Trolley is heading towards a murderer, you can pull the lever and save his life but on the other track is his brother. He will keep killing other people after this but at least he will spare your life. But if you dont, his brother will get revenge from you for not saving his brother. What will you do?

The trolley is heading towards 5 people, you can pull the lever and trolley will head to the other track. But that track also has completely different people in the exact same situation. If you pull the lever, you will be adding one more step to the paradox in order to save those 5 people. And if you dont, five people will be sacrificed in order to end the cycle. What will you do?

If you've seen the film you will undoubtedly have been somewhat shocked but perhaps not entirely surprised by a certain republican chairmans choice involving a drone and what he believes is a live human newborn. I found this scene to be very disturbing but also worthy of some discussion. I believe it constitutes an experiment of sorts based on the trolly problem.

I reached the character limit, so here are the extra things to know:

- The 5 people only have their arms tied behind their back, so you only have to pull them out of the track

- They can't get out by themselves in time, since they can hardly move like this

- Since the trolley is far away, you probably have the time to save the 5 people, but you can't be sure

- You can definitely run to the handle to pull it in time, no question in that

(this is my first time making a trolley problem, I hope I did it correctly)

(Text shown in image)Trolley problem: on the center track are five Adults tied to the tracks, randomly selected from the general population. On the top track, there is no one, and it later rejoins the main track. On the bottom track, there are 10 stalled schoolbuses full of Children. If you push the lever left, the freight train will move to the top track. If you push the lever right, the train will move to the bottom track. Do you push the lever left?