Hot-Button Issue

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

This has been making the rounds of the Internet, and sparking a fair amount of discussion, some controversy and (no surprise) a fair amount of vitriol. Most of the discourse around the question frames it as one of empathy: Pressing the Red button is the self-centered choice, while pressing the Blue button is the caring for others choice.

The seeming alignment of Red and Blue to Conservative and Liberal (Republican and Democrat, more precisely) political ideologies in the United States is fueling the debate, with people who chose the Red button being cast as overly individualistic and unempathetic and people who chose the Blue button being stereotyped as virtue-signalling would-be martyrs.

But thinking about the problem reveals another dividing line: the attribution of responsibility. To illustrate this, lets reduce the number of players from "everyone in the world" to seven people: Jack, Jill, Tom, Dick, Jane, Sally and Harry. I've randomly assigned Jill, Tom and Harry to select the Blue button, and Jack, Dick, Jane and Sally to select the Red button. Since "less than 50% of people" have selected the Blue button, only Jack, Dick, Jane and Sally survive. So the question becomes, who is responsible for Jill's, Tom's and Harry's deaths?

The "easy," but unhelpful answer is: everyone (presuming, of course, that one doesn't simply say "me," given that I'm the person who rolled dice to place the players into their groups). It required both that Jill, Tom and Harry pressed the Blue button and that Jack, Dick, Jane and Sally pressed Red for the game to slay Jill, Tom and Harry. But the discourse around empathy in the choice tends to turn on more specific attributions of fault, so it's worth looking at those.

The "Press Blue" camp tends to lay the responsibility at the feet of those people who vote Red. But for the fact that Jack, Dick, Jane and Sally pressed the Red button, Jill, Tom and Harry would have been safe, regardless of which choice they made. After all, those four are the majority in a group of seven, and if they'd all selected the Blue button, Jill's, Tom's and Harry's would have become irrelevant; they would have lived regardless.

The "Press Red" camp. on the other hand, places the responsibility for Jill's, Tom's and Harry's deaths on, well, Jill, Tom and Harry. But for the fact that Jill, Tom and Harry pressed the Blue button, they would, individually, still be alive, regardless of what Jack, Dick, Jane and Sally chose.

And this brings up one of the primary differences in outlook between the two camps. The "Press Blue" camp is looking at the matter as a collective action problem: anyone dying is the result of the failure of the collective; and the collective failed because a majority went with the Red button. Clearly, the "Press Red" camp doesn't see it this way, I suspect because they don't really judge the optimal choice to be different, regardless of what the players know.

Let's say, for a moment, that Harry is given the choice after the other six players have already made their choices as outlined above. And he's told that four players have already selected the Red button, and two have chosen Blue. While one could make a case that Harry might, for whatever reason, die alongside Jill and Tom, outside of that, it's hard to make the case that selecting the Blue button is the optimal choice here. For Harry to select the Blue button would appear to be actively suicidal. (We would also envisage a altered version of the game, in which Harry is given a choice such that the outcome only bears on himself: if he selects the Blue button he dies, and if he selects the Red button, he lives. Both variations have the same outcome for Harry, personally. This second variation provides even less of a reason to select the Blue button.)

Dealing specifically with Harry, it seems reasonable to place the responsibility for Harry pressing the Blue button with Harry, himself, regardless of which variation on the single-person choice we go with. Harry understands that pressing the Blue button would result in his death; it's possible that stress or carelessness could induce him to press the Blue button, even if he highly desired to live, but those factors aside, the choice is fairly clear.

For people in the "Press Red" camp, the logic, and the responsibility, doesn't change between knowing that there are already some people who have selected the Blue button, and not having any information about other's choices at all. (Or if we go with the altered version of the game, that the Blue button always results in the death of a single player.) If Harry decides to commit suicide, or misclicks due to stress or carelessness, the responsibility still lies with him. Pressing the Red button eliminates the risk of death, and the "Press Red" camp extrapolates that out to the broader game.

For people in the "Press Blue" camp, however, the logic is different, even if they agree that selecting the Blue button in constrained circumstances is a bad choice. Whether someone is being suicidal, or acting in error, enough other people acting together will rescue them from their choice, and failure to rescue a person from a bad choice when the opportunity for rescue is there is no different from deliberately inflicting the consequences of that choice.

If we switch the single player to Sally in our first one-person variation of the game, the fact that she understands that if she selects the Red button means that three people will die means that for the "Press Blue" camp, if she chooses to press the Red button, she has chosen to kill the players who selected Blue; the full responsibility for their deaths lies with her, not with Jill, Tom and Harry, nor with the presumed designer of the choice architecture of the game. Sally owns the outcome, no matter what other people have done.

Importantly, as near as I can tell, each camp tends to understand its own viewpoint as being the self-evidently correct one. This is the reason for the vitriol; it's something you'd expect when people understand one another to be willfully perverse. But it's worth keeping in mind that there are likely real differences in personality and worldview that underlie these viewpoints, just as Conservative and Liberal Americans tend to differ from one another when tested for the Big Five/Five Factor Personality Model.

The other interesting factor in the discussions around this is the fact that it tends to be framed as what one "should" do, even though the original question asks what one would do. In this, it's like Phillipa Foot's Trolley Problem: many people debate it with the goal of arriving at one "correct" answer, even though the problem is likely much more useful as a means to understand how one comes to such determinations. And again here, for many people, there are perceived factions: engaging the switch to divert the Trolley is seen as the Utilitarian choice, while Deontology is said to demand leaving the switch alone, despite the fact that either camp can make a case for either choice.

The Red Button Versus Blue Button "Dilemma" does offer interesting information; just not about empathy. And I think this is why it's perceived to generally align with American politics. The "Press Red" camp doesn't see people as having direct responsibility for a choice that someone else made, whether they made that choice intentionally, or not. The "Press Blue" camp, at least in this circumstance, does. Accordingly, I expect that for many people in the "Press Red" camp, contrivance aside, the scenario as a whole represents personal risks; the sort of thing where being careless has individual consequences. For many people in the "Press Blue" camp, on the other hand, the scenario represents broader risks to people, like climate change, that can be overcome by collective action, but are largely unaffected by individual choices. And that divide, between individual and collective responsibility plays out in a number of different ways across the American political spectrum.

I think that another thing that plays into it is the fact that pressing the Red button results in safety, no matter what happens. If the final tally favors Blue, everyone lives, regardless of the number of people who pressed the Red button, and if it favors Red, it's only those people who pressed Blue who suffer a consequence. Given what I understand of the online discourse, this asymmetry feels a lot like free riding... If collective action vanquishes a threat, those who didn't assist benefit as well. Of course, real-world problems don't normally operate like this; if global warming wreaks havoc on the climate, everyone suffers, but these sorts of disputes are as much emotional as logical.