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TheOtherDave comments on The Trolley Problem: Dodging moral questions - Less Wrong
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Great point. I've never thought of that and no-one I've ever tried this one has mentioned it either. This makes it more interesting to me that some people still wouldn't kill the baby, but that may be for reasons other than real moral calculation.
For my own part: I have no idea whether I would kill the baby or not.
And I have even less of an idea whether anyone else would... I certainly don't take giving answers like "I would kill the baby in this situation" as reliable evidence that the speaker would kill the baby in this situation.
But I generally understand trolley problems to be asking about what I think the right thing to do in situations like this is, not asking me to predict whether I will do the right thing in them.
I agree, I can't really reliably predict my actions. I think I know the morally correct thing to do, but I'm skeptical of my (or anyone's) ability to make reliable predictions about their actions under extreme stress. As I said, I usually use this when people seem overly confident of the consistency of their morality and their ability to follow it, as well as with people who question the plausibility of the original problem.
But I do recall the response distributions for this question mirroring the distribution for the second trolley problem; far fewer take the purely consequentialist view of morality than when they just have to flip a switch, even independent from their ability to act morally. I still don't find it incredibly illuminating, as all it shows is that our moral intuitions are fundamentally fuzzy, or at least that we value things other than just how many people live or die.