How many would not hurt you for money?

Would you cause pain to a stranger if it made you some money? She won't see you, and the pain won't be deadly. The participants of the new research were faced with such a dilemma and they mostly claimed that they would never do it.

Dr. Oriel Feldman Hall of the University of Cambridge suggests that answers to hypothetical questions generally do not reflect decisions made in a real situation. What people say they would do in a situation and what they actually do are often two different things, his study found.

As part of the study, respondents were asked to answer whether they would give someone an electric shock for a monetary reward. Most people said that they would never be able to inflict pain on another person, reports net.hr.

However, when they found themselves in a real-life dilemma where they could get money if they pressed the shock button, there was a twist. All the time, the subjects were connected to the MRI scanner. In addition to being able to choose whether to inflict pain on someone, they were able to decide on the intensity of the pain - the stronger the pain, the more money they were bet on.

Each research participant could press the shock button 20 times, so at the end of the test they could earn a maximum of 20 pounds.

While the question was still only hypothetical, 64 percent said they would never give an electric shock because of the monetary benefit. However, in the real situation, as many as 96 percent of the research participants gave an electric shock to a person who was in another room, and only because they wanted money. This means that only 4 percent of the research participants did not actually cause physical pain to another person.

Some only saw a person's arm twitching under an electric shock on screen - and they earned around £15,77 on average. Those who saw the face on the screen held back slightly more often than the electric shock and earned less, around £11,55.