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Update, 15th December: This result has now attained statistical significance (the Z-Score is 1.982; the p-value is 0.0477; the result is significant at p <.05.)

Here’s what I think is quite an interesting thing. There is a little trick in the Morality Play activity I’ve put together at Philosophy Experiments. One of the questions asks whether there is a moral obligation to help a person who is in severe need.

You see a charity advertisement in a newspaper about a person in severe need in India/Australia. There is no state welfare available to this person, but you can help them at little cost to yourself. You have good reason to believe that any help you offer will make a difference. Are you morally obliged to help the person?

Half the people undertaking the activity are told that the person lives in India; the other half that the person lives in Australia. They are then asked to state whether they think we are “Strongly Obliged”, “Weakly Obliged” or “Not Obliged” to help the person.

This is what the results are showing us so far.

There are a couple of things worth remarking upon. The first is that if you look at the overall results, you find that 5% more people respond there is no obligation to help the person in India than they do about the person in Australia (41% to 36%). However, although suggestive, these results are not yet statistically significant, so it’s not yet clear that this is a real pattern rather than just an artefact.

The second interesting thing is that if you exclude everybody who does not live in either the United States, United Kingdom or Canada from the result set, then this pattern disappears. In this instance, 37% of people think we’re not obliged to help the person in India compared to 36% who think the same thing about the person in Australia.

As yet, these results are merely suggestive, but it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.