Men And Women Use Different Scales To Weigh Moral Dilemmas

NPR:

You find a time machine and travel to 1920. A young Austrian artist and war veteran named Adolf Hitler is staying in the hotel room next to yours. The doors aren’t locked, so you could easily stroll next door and smother him. World War II would never happen.

But Hitler hasn’t done anything wrong yet. Is it acceptable to kill him to prevent World War II?

…

“Women seem to be more likely to have this negative, emotional, gut-level reaction to causing harm to people in the dilemmas, to the one person, whereas men were less likely to express this strong emotional reaction to harm,”Rebecca Friesdorf, the lead author of the study, tells Shots. A master’s student in social psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Friesdorf analyzed 40 data sets from previous studies. The study was published Friday in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

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