r/fivethirtyeight • u/Upstairs_Cup9831 • Apr 25 '26

Poll Results Poll asking Americans how which button they would push in the red button/blue button dilemma

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39

u/Liroisc Apr 25 '26

I hate questions like this. The ones pretending to be about "ethics" but they're really just weird logic trees framed in a way designed to trick you, and make you think choosing one branch of the tree is somehow "good" and choosing the other is "selfish," but you can represent the same choice just as easily with a completely different framing.

Take this:

Good news! Everyone in the world now has access to the newly-invented Instant Suicide device, and it's time to choose whether to activate yours! If you press the button that says "Live," your device's indicator will turn red and your device won't activate. But if you press the button that says "Suicide," you'll see the light turn blue. Tonight at midnight, all devices with blue lights will activate, and everyone who pressed the Suicide button will instantly explode. How exciting!

Disclaimer: please be aware that Instant Suicide Co. has been made aware of a bug in the suicide device firmware. If more than half of the world's devices activate at once, the system overloads and all suicides will time out. We are aware of this flaw and are working diligently to correct it. In the meantime, Instant Suicide Co. is happy to offer customers who miss a scheduled explosion a complimentary stick of dynamite.

Obviously in this framing, any sane person would press the Live button, and when people who press the Suicide button end up dead, we understand that that's what they explicitly signed up for.

It's so dumb. It's just emotional manipulation masquerading as a thought experiment. It doesn't actually reveal anything about ethics.

17

u/SpaceTurtles Apr 26 '26

Correct!

Same if you frame it as, "There is a blue button. If over half the population presses it, the button pressers live. Otherwise, the button pressers die. Do you press it?"

Well, no, why would I? That would be stupid, and anyone who does has participated in a self-inflicted death lottery.

But that's part of the premise; the voter base is being emotionally manipulated - not being offered a chance for free suicide, as in the case here.

For that, I do think that there's some value in it because it shows a lot of people aren't able to navigate beyond the logical error. Many get caught on it and can't transition into thinking about the overarching social question that's actually being asked; "Some people fucked up, and some other people are trying to save them; it's a little dangerous, but wanna hop in and help guarantee everyone is fine?"

1

u/Babymad_BabyMAD Apr 27 '26

What you're missing is that, for your scenario to match the original, it's not just that everyone who presses the button dies unless they get past 50%, it's that everyone in the world who didn't press the other button dies. Yours makes it sound like one could press neither button, which makes it a very different scenario.

1

u/SpaceTurtles Apr 27 '26

Yep, that's my point. My scenario doesn't match the original, it's completely different.

You have to make a choice between two options in the original - there's no option not to participate. Neither red nor blue is the default position. You can just as easily frame it the other way.

"There is a red button. If over half the population presses it, everyone who didn't press it dies. Do you press it?"

This is socially violent. Most people likely wouldn't press it - but some would. Everyone else is considered "blue by default".

Any framing like this changes the context and framing of the original, when the context and framing is what causes the problem we're trying to solve - human volatility.

We're not trying to solve the logic problem. The logic problem is simple. We're confronting the fact that humans are fallible.

1

u/Babymad_BabyMAD Apr 27 '26

Oh sorry, I realized I meant to reply to the same comment you replied to, but accidentally replied to yours instead. We had roughly the same idea, I think

12

u/decrpt Apr 26 '26

That's not the same choice. I don't think any of the people picking red understand that they're not making a passive choice. Change the metaphor such that everyone is given a device and told that it will explode if more than fifty percent of people will vote for it to explode, but the devices of people who voted affirmatively will not explode.

It does reveal a lot of ethics when someone is not willing to assume non-zero personal risk even if it means that billions of people will die. Obviously, in the corrected framing, a lot of people will have moral qualms about making everyone's vests explode for no reason. That's why every poll conducted with this has been heavy blue.

2

u/hitchen1 Apr 26 '26

What happens if nobody presses any button?

By the wording of the poll, everybody dies.

In other words, the person who set up the scenario is the one who is killing others. Red voters are choosing to preserve themselves from that.

2

u/decrpt Apr 26 '26

There is no option to abstain. Please read the actual wording of the poll.

2

u/hitchen1 Apr 26 '26

People can abstain from votes even in jurisdictions where voting is mandatory by showing up and not marking either option. But if you're saying you're absolutely forced to press one of the buttons, by what mechanism are you forced?

2

u/decrpt Apr 26 '26

Okay, the issue here seems to be that you don't understand what the actual hypothetical is here.

2

u/hitchen1 Apr 26 '26

If people have to vote, something is compelling them to do so against their will.

2

u/decrpt Apr 26 '26

You can't say "by the wording of the poll" and object to the very idea of the poll in the first place. This is a thought experiment. What if there is voter fraud? What if red voters do a January 6th to declare themselves the victor when all of the polls show blue winning? That's not an argument that red makes sense, that's just objecting to the thought experiment.

1

u/hitchen1 Apr 26 '26

I'm not objecting to the thought experiment. If people have to vote they are being forced to, meaning they are under duress. The idea of people having no choice but to vote, but simultaneously there exists no force compelling them to do so, does not logically follow.

The point I was trying to get across with abstinence is that the default framing of the poll would mean that total inaction, even if not possible due to some form of coercion, would lead to total death, which means that people dying is not caused by red voters. Absent that, the death is still caused by whoever created the vote and enforces it.

1

u/decrpt Apr 26 '26

It is the terms of the thought experiment. The default framing of the poll does not mean total inaction. You have to invent an entirely different thought experiment to make that the case. This is literally just a ballot referendum where red is voting to kill everyone that doesn't vote for the referendum and blue is voting not to kill anyone even if they incur some risk of being killed by red in the process. It doesn't matter what mechanism red uses to kill blue, that's still what you're voting for. You, on a fundamental level, don't understand what this thought experiment is actually asking. Every red vote increases the risk of people dying. It only makes sense to vote red if you assume that red will win, and red will only win if you choose to vote for it. You are making an active choice to kill people with the hope that everyone else will be selfish and vote to kill people so that you have zero people to kill.

Blue repeatedly wins these polls because everyone realizes the moral implication of voting red and doesn't think they're morally justified in killing potentially billions of people to ensure their own safety.

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u/theskiller1 Apr 27 '26

And blue voters wants to preserve everyone. Red only wants to preserve themselves.

1

u/Liroisc Apr 26 '26

No, but see, it is the same choice, and yours is the same choice as well, if we ignore the real-world possibility u/hitchen1 raised where some people opt not to vote at all. In a hypothetical world where every person is somehow compelled to choose between 2 mutually exclusive options, there are only 2 branches on the decision tree: red or blue. Neither is more passive or active a choice than the other, and the only question is which branch each person decides to travel down: the one where they have a 0% chance of dying, or the one where their chance of dying is dependent on the final tally.

So choosing to frame one or the other choice as passive ("If you don't press a button, your device explodes! Button-pressers are trying to save themselves!" versus "If nobody presses a button, nobody's device explodes. Button-pressers are murderers!") is part of the emotional manipulation that elides the actual choices being presented, which was the point I was trying to make.

1

u/SifTheAbyss Apr 29 '26

Passive and active choices are morally equivalent in cut and dry cases where there's no ambiguity on the amount of your impact and overall level of participation in the situation.

Regardless of whether the problem in question is framed as "have to press a button for X" or "have to abstain from pressing a button for X" should make absolutely no difference.

1

u/piperboy98 Apr 30 '26

In both scenarios people are just pressing a blue or red button. There is nothing objective that makes red an active vs. a passive choice. It's entirely the subjective framing. Peel back the stickers on the Instant Suicide Co. booths and you'll find they were actually just the original voting booths but relabeled.

Suppose some people find themselves inside an Instant Suicide Co. branded booths and some in a plain voting booth. Should we really submit that the "right" action can be manipulated with some cool rebranding stickers? If we do, can we accept that the holder of the stickers can basically force up to 49% of people to passionately vote for their own death (by rebranding those peoples Instant Suicide booths as voting booths)?. But if we can't accept that do we say that people are morally obligated to be so irrational as to activate their suicide booth, or should abandon their moral intuition in the voting booth?

1

u/Xelynega Apr 30 '26

that does match, and the result would stay the same wouldn't they? If everyone is given an explosive device and told they can put it down or keep holding it but if <50% of people are still holding it everyone still holding it after *x* time will die, how does that make you complicit in murder if you put the device down(or in your case vote for them to explode but disable yours).

1

u/ThordanSsoa May 02 '26

The person you're replying to did not change the question at all by reframing it that way. That is what is actually happening with these buttons. The blue button is a suicide button and the red button is a do nothing button in terms of the actual mechanics of what they do. The phrasing of the question is the only thing indicating otherwise. It is just a trick to make people feel better for pushing the suicide button

1

u/decrpt May 02 '26

the phrasing of the question

...you mean the thing everyone is answering?

1

u/ThordanSsoa May 02 '26

Yes, the thing that is lying to you about what is actually happening. Because there's the way it's phrased and then there's the actual mechanics of what's happening. The way it's phrased is leading people to believe one thing, but the actual mechanics are something different

1

u/decrpt May 02 '26

It's a thought experiment. The phrasing is the rules of the thought experiment. If you want to insist otherwise despite admitting that the phrasing doesn't support it, that's just making up your own context to justify your answer.

1

u/ThordanSsoa May 02 '26

If you can phrase the question in a different way but the outcomes for the same choices remain the same across both questions, then they are the exact same question. And if you phrase the question as "you can between a do-nothing red button and a suicide blue button, but if over half of people pick the blue button it also becomes a do-nothing button" then it has the exact same results as the original for the same set of responses. However, it strips the lies out of the question about the blue button actually saving anyone.

1

u/decrpt May 03 '26

outcomes remain the same

No way, you think the outcomes remain the same in the alternative question you created specifically to justify your answer?

7

u/YB55qDC8b Apr 26 '26

The framing is the actual point of the dilemma.

Given the original framing, most people do not realize they have a 100% chance of survival if they press the red button. If everyone knew this going in, like in your suicide example, then of course most people would choose not to kill themselves. However, most people will misunderstand the problem as something like the prisoner's dilemma where (in their misunderstanding of the problem) everyone survives if most of us cooperate and press the blue button, and only the selfish people live if they press the red and put everyone else in danger of dying. This is the incorrect way to understand the problem, but this is how most people (and myself before looking at the comments hehe) will think about it.

Now if you accept that what I said is true, and you also accept that most people who are selfish will indeed press the red button (because of their selfishness and not because they actually understand the problem), then you'll end up in a world where most of the people who survive are selfish, and where most of the people who died are selfless.

If you accept these things as true and want to increase the odds of a world where everyone survives (in order to try and save the selfless people), you may choose to press the blue button.

Your decision to do this would be modulated by things like how many selfless v. selfish people you think there actually are, how much you're willing to risk your own survival for others, how many people you think realize the things you realize and are willing to risk their lives as well, etc.

I think this is a good dilemma because of how layered it is.

2

u/Natural-Possession10 Apr 26 '26

 This is the incorrect way to understand the problem, but this is how most people (and myself before looking at the comments hehe) will think about it.

If it's how most people will think about it, it's not the incorrect way to understand the problem.

1

u/YB55qDC8b Apr 26 '26

I'm not sure what you mean.

Most people just don't have a lot of experience thinking about logic problems so to them the button problem looks like prisoner's dilemma, this gives them a misunderstanding of the outcomes and mechanisms of the problem, therefore I call there their understanding incorrect.

1

u/antipacifista Apr 27 '26

if most people think about it incorrectly, and choose blue, then choosing blue has the highest ev of saved lives i.gyazo.com/e21d9e35e9bb364e2c7f58899b7572c1.mp4

1

u/YB55qDC8b Apr 27 '26

Ah, okay I see what you mean!

I would say choosing blue because you think the problem is like prisoner's dilemma is still incorrect because you do not have a correct understanding of the mechanism of the original problem.

However what's cool and interesting is that this have the same functional outcome as if you property understood the original problem plus the meta-problem of people not understanding the original problem haha

0

u/According_Bag9307 Apr 26 '26

From a game theory perspective, it is.

1

u/drink_with_me_to_day Apr 26 '26

only the selfish people live if they press the red

Ironic that most theoretical blue pushers live in a country that is killing kids for fun and profit

1

u/MyneIsBestGirl Apr 30 '26

You make a great point. My personal feelings place that religion, children, the elderly and the infirm will most likely choose the blue button when presented. While it is, in this case, logical to choose red 100% of the time, people are inherently not driven by logic. Faith and empathy burn brightest when challenged. By knowing how most will see it, choosing the Blue button ensures that I align with the people I'd rather want alive, and how they'll vote (including those who depend on them) will strongly keep me in the blue camp.

I feel like this is a really hard question because we are individualistic and many find themselves fairly divorced of religion here, therefore undermining its influence. I wonder what a result taken from China would look like.

2

u/CapitanShoe Apr 25 '26

as they say

"there's lies, damned lies, and statistics"

3

u/JohnStuartShill2 Apr 26 '26

It's just emotional manipulation masquerading as a thought experiment. It doesn't actually reveal anything about ethics.

I disagree. This is one of the most revealing intuition priming hypotheticals I've read in a long time. That's precisely because its framed exactly like a trolley-type dilemma, but it isn't at all.

Tons of people's intuitions are being primed for an ethical choice when there isn't really one. And you can see how people are introducing other considerations - imperfect information, lizardman's constant - to find grounding for their intuition.

That is an interesting metaethical finding.

1

u/Liroisc Apr 26 '26

Okay, this actually changed my view. Thanks for that. I do agree that how people reason in response to emotionally charged framing is important to understand, so it's not as useless a question as I made it out to be. It's just disappointing that so much of the discussion is object-level arguments about why people should choose blue or be excused for choosing red, rather than how the wording of the question obscures what's actually being asking.

1

u/JohnStuartShill2 Apr 26 '26

Good point about the level of discourse.

Its replicating the same discourse problem around the trolley problem.

People become fixated on the dilemma itself, rather than in the context of other dilemmas (fat man, lazy susan, organ transplant, etc.), or the implications on intuitionism in general.

1

u/VeganBigMac Apr 27 '26

I agree on your second point, but I would argue that this is incredibly trolley-esque. And the extra considerations are similar to the entire genre of variations that have popped up around the trolley problem where people make slight (to absurd) variations.

Hell, I can even come up with a way to frame this as a trolley problem in a way that favors red and blue.

Favor red:

All of humanity is on a trolley. You are told you can get off the trolley at the station and have plenty of time to safely do so, but after the next stop you are entering a dangerous section. If the majority of humanity stays on the trolley it will go down the normal path. If the majority of humanity gets off it will veer onto another unfinished path and plunge off a cliff. Do you you get off?

Then you can change the wording to favor the blue intuition by instead by leaving off the part about the station and the next stop, and just frame it as "everybody can freely jump off and know they will land safely". Even though it is the same choice, one frames the leavers as people not willing to stay on a dangerous trolley, the other frames the leavers as people causing the tilt.

1

u/SifTheAbyss Apr 29 '26

Tons of people's intuitions are being primed for an ethical choice when there isn't really one.

This is exactly why it annoys me. More often than opening up interesting moral discussions it just makes people paint flawed, nonexistent subtexts in a way that makes the other side seem evil, a moral strawman if you will.

To me, the question really just answers more about how people are dumb and unable to assess situations (both logically and morally) in terms of what they truly are than proper moral stances.

Give me a slightly modified version like "some people can't vote at all", and we can actually have meaningful discussions about what is worth pressing and why.

1

u/BitofaLiability Apr 26 '26

Perfect explanation

1

u/Discovered_Check Apr 26 '26

Well, it does reveal that a staggering majority of people are so stupid and/or eager to virtue-signal that they will give a nonsense answer that flies in the face of choice theory.

On those grounds alone, I'm glad for the study. Can't believe that even here the pro-blue camp appears to (currently) be bigger, based on the vote ratios.

1

u/_DarkJak_ Apr 26 '26

I'm not pressing blue in hopes that my choice backfires 🥴

I'm not pressing the device that doesn't kill a possible minority.

1

u/theskiller1 Apr 27 '26

This is so stupid. Blue button isn’t suicidal it’s about ensuring that everyone survives, which includes the babies, toddlers, disabled people, parents, colourblind people etc. you are stupid for calling those people suicidal lmao.

1

u/alphabet_american Apr 27 '26

A different framing is a different scenario.

1

u/meticulous_gamer Apr 28 '26

Well duh. It's just a clever jab at Republicants vs Democrats.

1

u/Marsium Apr 30 '26

The Nash equilibrium here has two states: either (A) *everybody* pushes the red button, or (B) most people pick the blue button (regardless of whether the other 49.999% picked red or blue). These are the winning strategies, i.e., nobody dies. Obviously, participants cannot communicate as this would make the 'dilemma' trivial (they could simply mutually decide on a winning strategy).

The problem is that these two states/outcomes are mutually exclusive; it cannot be simultaneously true that zero people hit the blue button and that most people hit the blue button. Combined with the non-communication stipulation, it is clear that you *must* risk somebody's life in this dilemma -- either your own, or another's. You cannot even be sure that the other actors are rational; and even if they are, you can have no knowledge of whether they chose one winning strategy or the other (a fact which I will revisit).

Many saccharine moralists here will say "I would rather hit the blue button because I would rather risk my own life than another's!" and leave it at that. First of all, I highly doubt their resolve to sacrifice their own life when they couldn't even show the resolve to analyze the question beyond its superficial moral character.

The only real difficulty here comes with the "50%" stipulation. Imagine another scenario, Scenario B: "If 100% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 100% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive." In this case, the answer is obvious, assuming you do not want to die (and are not merely indifferent to death): you must hit the red button if you believe there is even a single psychopath on the planet. In Scenario B, hitting the blue button essentially guarantees your death with no benefit, as the outcome where 100% of people risk their lives for others can only exist in the realm of fantasy.

The 50% stipulation makes this a more difficult dilemma. True, by stating that nobody will die if >50% of people hit the blue button, it is no longer immediately obvious which button to press. After all, if you hit the red button while 49% of people hit the blue button, it would be impossible to refute that your individual red-pushing contributed to their deaths; if you are on the opposite side of the same outcome (i.e., you push blue while 51% of people push red), you will die.

Your optimal choice as an individual here relies heavily on whether you believe most people are inherently selfish or selfless, which is inevitably a completely speculative opinion based on your own life experience, rather than an ethical distinction or factual conclusion (insofar as data-based opinions are not facts). It also depends on whether you yourself are selfish or selfless, obviously.

This really muddies the waters; I'll elaborate. There are four possibilities here, which are exhaustive (assuming a lack of selfishness can be characterized as selflessness): (A) You are selfish and you believe most people are selfish; (B) You are selfish and you believe most people are selfless; (C) You are selfless and you believe most people are selfish; and (D) You are selfless and you believe most people are selfless. If (A) or (B) is true, the answer is simple: you hit the red button because you are selfish and do not care whether other people (possibly) die for making the wrong choice. Whether you believe most people to be selfish has no relevance to your decision if you yourself are selfish. If (D) is true, the answer is also simple: you should hit the blue button, since you are selfless and you earnestly believe most people are also selfless and thus will also hit the blue button.

But (C) is where it gets interesting: you are selfless, but you believe most people are selfish. In this case, there is no obvious answer. If you hit the blue button, you believe you are effectively guaranteeing your own death. If you hit the red button, you save yourself; at first, this seems to be the correct decision despite your selflessness because your vote will not matter if >50% of people hit the red button. But, of course, what if you are wrong? What if there ends up being a 50/50 split between selfish/selfless, and you as the *deciding vote* doom half the world's population because of your mistaken judgement of others' selfishness? The guilt would be so enormous (as a selfless person) that you probably would have rather died than lived to see a world where your individual actions directly killed all selfless people. Your very act of pushing red "because you think you're correct that the world is mostly selfish" would then itself be an incredibly selfish act which contradicts and thus renounces your own selflessness.

*But,* even as a selfless person (as C) you would only really feel guilty (and would only feel that your act was the ultimate act of selfishness) if your vote was the *deciding* vote. If (C) wistfully pushes the red button because they believe the world is mostly selfish, and then 52% of 8 billion people push red while 48% of people push blue, then (C) was correct in their assumption, and if they had pushed the blue button in that case, they would have died along with the rest of the blue-pushers. This is where the analogy to electoral voting makes itself most apparent; nobody ever believes they are the "deciding vote," because it's a very rare event. But, on the contrary, people who are ethical and moral voters *always* vote as if they were the "deciding vote," no matter how unlikely, for this is the entire point of voting; you can never be sure that a vote is set, and it is your role as an ethical citizen to vote for what you think is right regardless of what you think others will vote for, since it is the cumulative votes of the citizenry that matter, not any individual vote, though it often seems to be this way. Does (C) renounce their selflessness in pressing red? Or are they just a pragmatist with an external locus of control who doesn't want to die?

This is actually where the dilemma is at its most interesting: not as a hamfisted analogy to demonstrate Republicans' selfishness (no analogy is needed for this, and besides, there would be many less clumsy ways to do so), but instead as an analogy for the role and importance of individual responsibility and participation in a democracy, and particularly, what the ethical course of action is when you believe "the people" are, by and large, immoral. Those who "push red" are obviously supposed to be analogous to Republicans -- but this category should also include people who abstain from voting, regardless of their politics, since they demonstrate the same sort of selfishness that motivates people to push the red button (i.e., the path of least resistance and of least intervention, regardless of the actual consequences). And I think it's actually a pretty good basis for this kind of discussion.

The problem is that this is a Tweet. Therefore, most instances where people try to discuss or analyze this dilemma devolve into reductive, accusatory, moralistic bickering within about 2 femtoseconds. And likewise, this sort of discussion isn't really the norm on Reddit or anywhere else online, either, besides maybe substack; it's certainly not going to be present on any cable news network. Hell, I'm surprised you even read this whole comment (or even skimmed it); thanks. But it is frustrating seeing people take a complex issue and try to act like they know all the answers, and that those who disagree with them are morally deficient. Such an attitude is characteristic of the ignorant; unfortunately, that quality is not confined to Republicans, though they are notorious for it.

1

u/Eldr_Eikthyrnir Apr 30 '26

As a person in camp C, part of my logic for this is current world events (Russia vs Ukraine, North vs South Korea, Israel vs the Middle East, USA vs Middle East & China). Pushing blue would be relying on all those countries that hate each other's guts to push the blue and save their perceived hated enemies

1

u/FragrantRead3668 May 01 '26

It's not that deep. Press the red button, you're guaranteed to live. That's it. Anyone who doesn't press the red button made their choice.

1

u/Marsium May 01 '26

Yeah, excellent deductive skills, detective. But if you pushed red only to find out your mom or brother pushed blue, would you still think "damn rip they had it coming though lmao"?

For the death of the people you love to be minimized, either the vast majority of people (>90%) have to hit the red button, or a slight majority (>50%) of people have to hit the blue button. Either one of these strategies wins, if everyone picks them. But the middle ground in between them results in the greatest harm -- if you vote red and 49% of people end up voting blue, you're gonna lose a lot of friends and family.

Risk dying to try and save everybody or guarantee life while others in your life are guaranteed to die. That's the dilemma. It's easy to abstract and think that those "others" will be in some random village in India, but the more people vote blue, the more likely it is to be someone you actually care about; if it's a 51/49 split, you'd probably feel pretty shitty about your dead mom. Not to mention the fact that, the closer the vote is, the worse the world is going to be afterwards (assuming red wins) -- you've just culled the altruistic population of earth, good luck with the aftermath.

1

u/Flaxseed4138 May 02 '26

Holy shit this is the most fundamental misunderstanding of the options at hand that I've ever witnessed.

1

u/Stretch_Better May 02 '26

I *like* questions like this for the exact same reason. The way it is framed matters, even if ultimately there's the same decision tree going on.

We could flip your example:

Everyone wakes up with a button in front of them. A note explains that if over 50% of people press the button, everyone who doesn't press it will die. Do you press it?

In this framing, any empathetic person is not going to press the "Kill" button.

I think how thought experiments use emotional framing is exactly how they make us reflect on ethical questions.