Abstract
Moral perceptions of harm and fairness are instrumental in guiding how an individual navigates moral challenges. Classic research documents that the gender of a target can affect how people deploy these perceptions of harm and fairness. Across multiple studies, we explore the effect of an individual’s moral orientations (their considerations of harm and justice) and a target’s gender on altruistic behavior. Results reveal that a target’s gender can bias one’s readiness to engage in harmful actions and that a decider’s considerations of harm—but not fairness concerns—modulate costly altruism. Together, these data illustrate that moral choices are conditional on the social nature of the moral dyad: Even under the same moral constraints, a target’s gender and a decider’s gender can shift an individual’s choice to be more or less altruistic, suggesting that gender bias and harm considerations play a significant role in moral cognition.
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Author Biographies
Oriel FeldmanHall received her PhD in neuroscience from Cambridge University. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at New York University.
Tim Dalgleish is a clinical psychologist and program leader at the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University.
Davy Evans received his PhD in psychology from Cambridge University. He is currently pursuing is clinical PhD from University of Birmingham.
Lauren Navrady was research staff at the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University. She is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Edinburgh.
Ellen Tedeschi is pursuing her PhD at Columbia University.
Dean Mobbs received his PhD from University College London. He is currently an associate professor at Columbia University.
Handling Editor: Jesse Graham
