Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

Men are more likely to accept responsibility for harmful actions that benefit the greater good than women, and these gender-based differences are based on emotions rather than the rational evaluation of outcomes, a new Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin study claims.

“Women are more likely to have a gut-level negative reaction to causing harm to an individual, while men experience less emotional responses to doing harm,” explained lead author Rebecca Friesdorf, a graduate student in social psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada.

Men are more likely than women to kill Hitler

In a statement, the researchers use a sample scenario to explain their point: if you had access to a time machine, would it be morally right to go back and kill Adolf Hitler when he was still only a young Austrian artist in order to prevent World War II and save millions of lives?

Based on their findings, Friesdorf and her colleagues reported that men would be more willing to do so for the greater good than women, and that females would be less likely to support this type of act, even if it ultimately helped keep far more people from dying in the long run.

Their work is based on large-scale re-analysis of data from more than 6,000 men and women, and they attribute the gender difference to stronger emotional aversion to harmful actions among women than among men. They found no evidence of gender differences in rational evaluations of the outcomes of these activities, contradicting the belief that women are less rational.

Women are more emotional, but not less rational

Friesdorf, University of Cologne postdoctoral fellow Dr. Paul Conway, and University of Texas at Austin psychology professor Dr. Bertram Gawronski, asked participants 20 questions involving various different moral dilemmas. The questions centered around decisions about murder, torture, lying, and research involving animals to examine the gender differences about these types of judgments.

Their research looked at two contrasting philosophical principles relating to ethics: deontology, which is based on the notion that an action’s morality depends on its consistency with an ethical norm, and utilitarianism, which asserts that an action is moral if it is done for the greater good. Based on the latter, an action could be moral in one circumstance but not in another.

They used an advanced statistical procedure to quantify the strength of both deontological and utilitarian inclinations, and found that women were more likely than men to adhere to principles of deontology. However, they found no evidence for gender differences in utilitarian reasoning, indicating that men and women engage in similar levels of rational thinking about outcomes.

“The findings suggest that gender differences in moral dilemma judgments are due to differences in affective responses to harm rather than cognitive evaluations of outcomes,” the authors wrote.

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