you and 99 other rational (i.e. not making decisions at random) people are placed in individual rooms (such that you can't communicate with each other) with a blue button in front of you. the blue button kills everyone who presses it (including yourself), unless at least 51 people press it, in which case it does nothing. you are under no obligation to press the button and it is impossible to press accidentally. whether you press it or not, you are free to leave after one minute (unless you're dead).
Do you press the button?
Yes
No
aw shit, sorry guys, i forgot to add one little detail: instead of just "not pressing the blue button", you have to press a second red button to indicate that you're declining to press the blue button. so just replace "not pressing the blue button" with "pressing a red button" in this scenario and everything else about it is unchanged. that shouldn't have any influence on your decision to press the blue suicide button or not so just treat it as window dressing :)
Now it is noteworthy that this differs from the original question in a few varying ways.
1. 100 people is not equivalent towards the world population. The smaller the group size is at hand the more you can approximate the situation as game theory. As the group size expands it becomes statistically more likely that a percentage of the population will choose the blue button.
2: this assumes that the other people are rational, this of course is not true in the original premise. The world populace includes both irrational adults, emotional idealists, and children. All of which favor the blue button.
3: reducing the red button to a passive action rather than an active action does in fact influence people’s decision. Likely a poll where the blue button is shown as the passive action would result in a much higher percentage of people choosing blue despite the same end result. This is also why scenarios such as replacing the set up with the trolly problem are false equivalency’s.
4: regardless 15 people die in this poll currently. 15% of the world population dying instantly would be the greatest crises humanity has seen.
Overall in this constructed scenario, yea hit the red button. Even if these scenarios were equivalent the matter of fact is that a large portion of people will hit the blue button, and thus the only way to evade disaster is to reach above 50%.
TLDR: In smaller groups red button becomes optimal, People are not rational, 15% instantaneously might be worse than the Black Death world crises immediately.
#if you need to convince people to choose red#then red is obviously the wrong answer
