Some “extreme” question lists rely on disgust or shock. A choice does not need either to feel extreme. The harder questions usually put something meaningful at risk: safety or freedom, reality or happiness, survival or memory, resources or human connection. Those are the kinds of choices behind DILEMMIX’s Extreme Scenarios pack — and choosing A or B is only the beginning.
What makes a hypothetical question truly extreme?
An extreme hypothetical question puts two meaningful priorities in conflict under unusually high stakes. The difficulty should come from what each choice costs, not simply from shock, gore or disgust.
An extreme scenario is not necessarily a moral dilemma. A moral dilemma asks you to weigh competing moral duties or principles; an extreme scenario can instead revolve around survival, identity, reality, freedom, uncertainty or belonging without either option being morally right or wrong.
Extreme questions also share something with the long tradition of thought experiments. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes thought experiments as devices of imagination used for exploration, education and conceptual analysis. Construal-level theory likewise treats hypotheticality as a form of psychological distance: when a situation is far from ordinary experience, people may represent it more abstractly and have to reason about the principle beneath the choice.
Survival & belonging
Start with scenarios where staying alive is not automatically the same as preserving the things that make life meaningful.
- 01
Resources or people? · Public in-game preview
After a global catastrophe, would you rather be the last human alive with access to almost unlimited resources OR one of 1,000 survivors with very scarce resources?The trade-off: Material security vs. human connection
Unlimited resources give you an enormous survival advantage. The other option gives you society, relationships, shared knowledge and the possibility of rebuilding — but also scarcity and dependence on other people.
Change one detail: What if you knew the 1,000 survivors were cooperating successfully? · What if they were already fighting over the remaining resources?
- 02
Guaranteed survival or everyone you know?
Would you rather leave Earth for a safe colony where your survival is guaranteed but you will never communicate with another human again OR stay on Earth with everyone you love even though humanity’s survival is uncertain?The trade-off: Certainty vs. belonging
One option guarantees that you continue. The other protects the relationships that may be part of the reason you want to continue in the first place.
Change one detail: Are you choosing survival — or choosing what makes survival worth having?
Reality & identity
The next two choices remove physical danger and make the stakes more abstract: truth, continuity and what it means to remain yourself.
- 03
Reality or simulation? · Public in-game preview
You discover the world is a simulation. Wake up in a reality far harsher than your current life OR erase the discovery and remain happy inside the simulation?The trade-off: Truth vs. experienced happiness
This dilemma has a philosophical relative in Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine. Later work by Felipe De Brigard suggested that some resistance to changing realities may partly reflect status quo bias, which makes the starting point of the scenario matter.
Change one detail: What if everyone you love exists only inside the simulation? · What if the people you love are waiting for you in the outside reality?
- 04
Upload your mind or accept the end?
A technology can create a perfect digital continuation of your mind, including your memories and personality. Would you use it even though you can never know whether the consciousness that wakes up is really you OR refuse and accept that your life ends with your biological body?The trade-off: Continuity vs. certainty about identity
If a system reproduces every memory and personality trait you have, the informational copy may be excellent while the question of first-person continuity remains unresolved. That is the identity problem behind mind-uploading discussions.
Change one detail: What if your biological body remains alive after the upload?
Freedom, survival & continuity
These scenarios keep the stakes personal: how much control, memory or safety would you exchange to keep going?
- 05
Survival at the cost of your memories?
A treatment can prevent you from dying from an illness or injury, but every time it saves your life, one year of your autobiographical memories disappears permanently. Would you take the treatment OR remain normally vulnerable and keep your memories unaffected?The trade-off: Survival vs. continuity of self
The treatment protects the body by charging a cost to personal history. The difficult part is deciding whether survival still means the same thing as more of the story that made you who you are disappears.
Change one detail: What if you could choose which year disappears? · What if the year were selected at random?
- 06
Perfect safety or real freedom?
Would you rather live inside a protected habitat where food, shelter and safety are guaranteed but your work, schedule and movements are decided for you OR leave permanently and face a dangerous world where every decision is your own?The trade-off: Security vs. autonomy
Inside, survival is easier but control belongs to someone else. Outside, freedom is genuine but so are its consequences.
Change one detail: What if residents could vote on the habitat’s rules once a year?
Connection & isolation
The last two questions ask what makes relationships feel real when ordinary human connection is distorted or split in two.
- 07
One hundred versions of you or no humans at all? · Public in-game preview
Would you rather live for a year on a tropical island with 100 identical clones of yourself OR in a futuristic city where you are the only human and everyone else is a robot?The trade-off: Similarity vs. otherness
Both worlds remove ordinary human variety in opposite directions. On the island everyone is human, but everyone is you. In the city you may have endless interaction, but none of the beings around you is human.
Change one detail: Which world would feel lonelier — and what makes another person genuinely other to you?
- 08
Remember them or be remembered?
Would you rather remember everyone you have ever loved while they completely forget you OR have everyone you love remember you while you completely forget them?The trade-off: Carrying the relationship vs. remaining part of someone else’s life
Neither option erases the relationship completely. One keeps the shared history inside you; the other preserves your place in their lives while removing your access to it.
Change one detail: Is a relationship still yours if only one person remembers it?
Make the game harder: predict before the reveal
Turn the questions into a social game: choose privately, predict another player’s answer, reveal both choices, and only then explain why.
Smith and Krajbich studied a related distinction between predicting another person’s decision and making a decision on that person’s behalf. In their specific laboratory tasks, participants first learned another person’s preferences and later predicted new choices with roughly 80% accuracy. That figure is not a benchmark for friendship and it is not a DILEMMIX statistic; the useful point is that predicting someone and deciding for them are different judgments.
After the reveal, change one condition and ask: What one detail would make you switch to the other side? A single changed condition often exposes where the real boundary sits more clearly than the first vote alone.
- Choose privately
- Predict another player
- Reveal both choices
- Explain the reasoning
- Change one detail and ask whether either answer changes
An extreme answer is not a personality test
These scenarios can reveal an interesting line of reasoning. They cannot tell you with certainty what someone would do if the imagined situation became real.
Camerer and Mobbs reviewed evidence comparing hypothetical and consequential decisions and concluded that imagined-choice tasks can sometimes give an incomplete picture of real decisions. Choosing freedom here does not make someone inherently fearless; choosing the simulation does not prove they prefer comfort to truth in everyday life.
The useful discovery is narrower: what mattered most to that person in that scenario, at that moment — and what reasoning got them there?
When do extreme hypothetical questions work best?
These questions usually work better after the group has warmed up. The stakes should be imaginary; the social pressure should not be real. Anyone should be able to skip a scenario without having to justify it.
- A game night after a lighter first round
- A long road trip
- A weekend away or cabin trip
- A late-night conversation
- A group of friends comfortable disagreeing without judging one another
Research and further reading
- 01View source
Thought Experiments
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy · 2026
- 02View source
Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance
Psychological Review, 117(2), 440–463 · 2010
- 03View source
If you like it, does it matter if it’s real?
Philosophical Psychology, 23(1), 43–57 · 2010
- 04View source
Should You Upload Your Mind?
Think, 22(65), 33–37 · 2023
- 05View source
Predictions and choices for others: Some insights into how and why they differ
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152(2), 528–541 · 2023
- 06View source
Differences in Behavior and Brain Activity during Hypothetical and Real Choices
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(1), 46–56 · 2017
Eight questions here. Fifty in Extreme Scenarios.
Choose your answer, predict someone else’s, reveal both — then change one detail and see whether either of you still agrees with yourselves.