Whereas many studies shown cultural or ecological variability in moral judgments, responses to the trolley problem (kill one person to save five others) across nations provided evidence to the view that certain moral principles might be universal in humans. In order to provide more data from non-western traditional populations, we conducted a study in an indigenous Papuan society inhabiting the remote Yalimo valley. To uphold the ecological validity of the original trolley dilemma, we modified it into the “falling tree dilemma”. Our experiment shown that the Yali are significantly less willing than Western people to sacrifice one person to save five others in the moral dilemma. The results we obtained indicate that such moral judgments are probably less intuitive than we think. Quite to the contrary, they are likely to be rooted in cognitive processes that enable reaching a conscious moral verdict as well as highly mediated by sociocultural factors.
