Development of ethical decision making scenarios that focus on emergency rescue

Behavior experiments are the generally used methods to study ethical decision making process. However there are very few experiments contexts that concerns emergency rescue after huge natural disaster. We developed 6 such scenarios for the examination of ethical decision making in emergency rescue. All these scenarios are selected from films or novels that depict natural disasters, such as "Tangshan Earthquake"or"2012". The scenarios embody such ethical problems as "who has the priority to be saved among the trapped people", "how to trade-off the risk the rescuer takes with the possibility that the victim will be saved" and "how to calculate the environment disruption with rescue effect" etc. Through the manipulation of the 6 dimensions of perceived moral intensity, each scenario then becomes 3 versions. In order to evaluate the ability of scenarios to be written to accommodate a manipulation of one moral intensity dimension, 35 master students were randomly selected to participate in manipulation check. And the results showed that the manipulation was judged to be successful as intended.