This study examines the impact of virtual reality (VR) immersion and realism on moral decision-making in the trolley dilemma, with a focus on the role of individual personality traits. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: a text-based vignette, a low-realism VR scenario, or a high-realism VR scenario. We investigated whether VR influences decisions to push the lever (utilitarian choice) compared to text-based scenarios, and explored whether personality traits, specifically honesty-humility, interact with the experimental conditions. Our results reveal that decisions made in VR did not differ significantly from those made in text-based conditions, suggesting that the immersive nature of VR does not fundamentally alter moral decision-making. However, in the high-realism VR condition, honesty-humility emerged as a significant moderator, with higher scores reducing the likelihood of utilitarian decisions. This finding suggests that the immersive and realistic nature of high-realism VR activates individual traits, such as honesty-humility, in ways that text-based or low-realism scenarios do not. These results highlight the potential of high-realism VR to serve as a valuable tool for studying moral decision-making by engaging participants on a deeper emotional and cognitive level. While VR may not change moral choices outright, its ability to activate personality traits has important implications for ethics education, training, and the study of individual differences in moral psychology.
