Not sure how much money was wasted, but I am sure someone is getting their Doctorate out of this.

A little more on the nature of the experiment:


You’re on a railway bridge. Below you, a train is heading full speed towards five unsuspecting people working on the track. There is a fat man standing on the bridge with you. If you shoved him off, his impact would stop the train, and you would save the five workers. Would you push him?

According to new research, your answer to that question depends largely on whether you are reading it as a native English speaker, or as someone with a different mother tongue. Researchers from the University of Chicago and the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona presented this moral dilemma to 725 participants, most of whom were native speakers of Spanish with English as a foreign language, or native speakers of English with Spanish as a foreign language. They discovered that when participants were presented with the dilemma in their native tongue, they were far less likely to opt for pushing the fat man than those who read the description in their second language. Native English speakers were almost twice as likely to push "el hombre grande" than "the large man". Breaking a moral code by killing the bystander seems easier to do when considering the problem in a language learnt later in life. The authors of the study attribute this to the fact that foreign language appears to trigger a less emotional response, leaving people more able to make a pragmatic decision.