MC · Moral Atlas

An atlas of conscience · 6 dilemmas · 60 seconds

Where in the world thinks like you?

A driverless car must choose whom to spare — and you choose six times, seconds each. Then the map tells you which corner of the world judges exactly like you: from ~40 million real decisions, scientists found only three moral camps of conscience. One of them is yours.

  • ~40M real decisions
  • 233 countries
  • 3 moral clusters
  • ~60 s your test

Your answers never leave this page. No account, no server, no leaderboard — the only conscience measured here is yours. Built on the Moral Machine experiment (MIT Media Lab, Awad et al., Nature 2018).

Opening the atlas

Six situations. Two options each time. None of them comfortable.

The world has three consciences, not one

Between 2016 and 2018, the Moral Machine platform put millions of people in the driverless car's seat: thirteen crash scenarios varying age, gender, status, fitness, number of lives — and the brutal question of whom to spare. When Edmond Awad and his MIT colleagues analyzed the ~40 million answers from 233 countries, the map did not scatter at random. It gathered into three moral blocs, the way languages gather into families.

Western

Europe, North America, the English-speaking Commonwealth. Spare more lives, spare the young, intervene rather than stand aside.

Eastern

The Far East, Islamic countries, South Asia. Age and status weigh more; not intervening is the more respectable option.

Southern

Latin America and former French colonies. The strongest pull to spare the young — and to save more lives.

Romania falls, in the study's grouping, into the Western cluster (the Orthodox family). That is why the page shows the Romanian prior as your landmark: landing in Eastern or Southern tells you something real about yourself — not wrong, morally expatriate.

How the page measures you — and what it doesn't

Each of the 6 dilemmas tests one axis from the study (number, age, fitness, species, status, action vs. omission). For each cluster, the page knows how likely someone there would pick the first option — illustrative values inspired by the study's reported directions. Your answers are compared against the three profiles, and the percentages are normalized similarity scores. The same six answers always give the same result.

The limit, next to the result, not in a footer: six dilemmas are not 40 million decisions. Your percentages are a game compass, not a lab measurement — they show the shape, not the decimals. And the page is no diagnosis: it doesn't say what kind of person you are, only where on the map people think like you.

Why it matters beyond the game

Driverless cars will need written rules for situations we resolve by instinct — and instincts are not universal. An algorithm calibrated in Berlin will judge differently from one calibrated in Jakarta, and both will feel "obvious" at home. The moral map is no lab curiosity: it is the working draft of the laws that will drive tomorrow's cars. The question "where do they think like me?" will soon become "whose morality is running my car?"

Sources

  • Awad, E. et al. (2018). The Moral Machine experiment. Nature, 563, 59–64. DOI 10.1038/s41586-018-0637-6 — ~40 million decisions, 233 countries, the 3-cluster solution.
  • The experiment's anonymized data: osf.io/3hvt2 — the open record for verification and follow-up research.
  • Romania as a Western prior: the Orthodox grouping in the study's cluster solution; an exact national norm needs the per-country file with disclosed N.