Antisocial Attitudes, Gender and Moral Judgments: An Experimental Study

Juergen Bracht (juergen.bracht@abdn.ac.uk) and Adam Zylbersztejn (zylbersztejn@gate.cnrs.fr)
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Juergen Bracht: University of Aberdeen Business School, Department of Economics, Edward Wright Building, Dunbar Street, Aberdeen, AB24 3QY, Scotland

No 1630, Working Papers from Groupe d'Analyse et de Théorie Economique Lyon St-Étienne (GATE Lyon St-Étienne), Université de Lyon

Abstract: We study questionnaire responses to moral dilemmas hypothetical situations in which sacrificing one life may save many other lives. We demonstrate gender differences in moral judgments: male participants are more supportive of the sacrifice than female participants. We investigate the importance of the previously studied source of the endorsement of the sacrfice: antisocial attitudes. First, we elicit the individual proneness to spiteful behavior using an incentivized experimental game. We demonstrate that spitefulness can be sizable but it is not associated with gender. Second, we find that gender is associated with moral judgments even when we account for individual differences in antisocial attitudes. Our results suggest that the performance of many institutions (related to the distribution of wealth or punishment, for instance) may be affected by the gender of the decision-makers.

Keywords: Gender; moral dilemmas; moral judgments; spite; antisocial attitudes; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-gen and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Working Paper: Antisocial Attitudes, Gender and Moral Judgments: An Experimental Study (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gat:wpaper:1630

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