How Do People Resolve Dilemmas? Eliciting Subjective Decision Factors

The organization and operation of human societies involve many kinds of social rules which we all more or less obey. Such rules for proper behaviors in a society or a group are called normative or deontic. The deepest, most internalized forms of these rules govern our moral and ethical behaviors. A key concern in this type of situations is deontic conflicts: decisions where all the alternatives lead to the violation of some norms. People think critically about these kinds of decisions. But, what they think about may not be always clear. Our broad focus is on difficult kinds of forced decisions where people need to choose between alternative undesirable outcomes. Most specifically we focus on so-called deontic dilemmas, where each alternative results in some kinds of violation of a normative/ethical rule. An elicitation approach is proposed that helps to identify the subjective factors that people use to resolve these kinds of difficult choices. Our technique is a hybrid of two established research methodologies: repertory grid and conjoint analysis. We illustrate our technique using a well-known challenge problem from psychology, known as the Trolley Problem. The technique is implemented as a prototype web-based application. We refer to our technique as the Open Factor Conjoint Methodology. We identify areas that need further research in order to refine and fully validate the methodology.