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Abstract

Variants of the “trolley problem” present moral dilemmas in which one must choose whether to sacrifice one person to save many (1). Recently, Awad et al. (2) claimed that people in countries with lower relational mobility are more likely to reject sacrificial decisions in the trolley problem. Relational mobility refers to the fluidity with which people can foster new relationships (3). However, the country-level analyses Awad et al. report (2) (Fig. 1A) do not account for two important factors. First, the analyses do not account for Galton’s problem: nonindependence between countries attributable to shared cultural ancestry and/or geographic proximity (4). Controlling for such dependencies can reduce or remove putative cross-cultural associations (5). Second, the analyses do not account for measurement error on the country-level sacrificial probabilities or relational mobility latent variable averages. Ignoring measurement error can inflate regression coefficients … ↵1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: scott.claessens{at}gmail.com.