5 Decembre 2016 - Séminaire du LED - Adam Zylbersztejn (Univ Lyon 2) - Antisocial Attitudes, Gender and Moral Judgments: An Experimental Study

Date de publication : 21 févr. 2017 12:50:07

Abstract: We study questionnaire responses to moral dilemmas -- hypothetical situations in which sacrificing one life may save many other lives. We find gender differences in moral judgments: men are more supportive of the sacrifice than women. We investigate the importance of the previously studied source of the endorsement of the sacrifice: 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. Link to paper: ftp://ftp.gate.cnrs.fr/RePEc/2016/1630.pdf