An update on my Sacrifices post

There are a few obvious reasons people are ignoring social distancing protocol and I didn't want to make it seem that "a lack of opportunities for heroism" is the best I could come up with.

First, it's easy to forget that many people aren't following the news as much as I am. It is quite likely that the young people on spring break read that they are at low risk for dying from infection ... and simply stopped reading after that.

They probably never considered the fact that they could be asymptomatic and pass the virus on to someone who could die from it. So simple ignorance is a very probable explanation.

Second, the parents in my generation might not be considering the fact that staying home is a bigger sacrifice for young people than it is for us. Now that schools have closed, my kids are already at home. I've been told to telecommute to work. So my biggest responsibilities, work and parenthood, have made the decision to quarantine for me.

For young people, for whom socialization is a big part of their life, staying under quarantine is a big sacrifice. Most college students don't work and are childless. I think it's easy to forget about this.

Finally, this is something I read years ago that I'm going to try to explain but I'll probably get something wrong. In a nutshell: The secondary effects of passing the virus on don't feel as real to us.

In Moral Tribes, Joshua Greene uses the philosophical trolley problem to explain how the mind works.

"A runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five people. In the switch dilemma one can save them by hitting a switch that will divert the trolley onto a side-track, where it will kill only one person. In the footbridge dilemma one can save them by pushing someone off a footbridge and into the trolley’s path, killing him, but stopping the trolley. Most people approve of the five-for-one tradeoff in the switch dilemma, but not in the footbridge dilemma."

Greene found that subjects' responses changed when they added in the loop variant as well as the obstacle/push collide variant.

"As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people and you can divert it onto a secondary track. However, in this variant the secondary track later rejoins the main track, so diverting the trolley still leaves it on a track which leads to the five people. But, the person on the secondary track is a fat person who, when he is killed by the trolley, will stop it from continuing on to the five people. 

The only physical difference here is the addition of an extra piece of track."

Here is a figure that may help.

Greene found that the results changed a bit from the original scenario, with more people willing to be okay with the physical act of commission that leads to a bystander's death once the secondary track is added.

It seems that adding these secondary effects made the deaths less real to some people. Likewise, the idea of catching a virus and unknowingly passing it on to someone who dies from it, someone you never know, feels less urgent.

It's not lost on me that, in the trolley scenario, you get to save five lives; an act of heroism.