Intuitive Moral Judgments are Robust across Variation in Gender, Education, Politics and Religion: A Large-Scale Web-Based Study

Abstract

Research on moral psychology has frequently appealed to three, apparently consistent patterns:(1) Males are more likely to engage in transgressions involving harm than females; (2) educated people are likely to be more thorough in their moral deliberations because they have better resources for rationally navigating and evaluating complex information; (3) political affiliations and religious ideologies are an important source of our moral principles. Here, we provide a test of how four factors -gender, education, politics and religion -affect intuitive moral judgments in unfamiliar situations. Using a large-scale sample of participants (n=8778) who voluntarily logged on to the internet-based Moral Sense Test (available online at http://moral. wjh.harvard.edu), we analyzed responses to 145 unique moral and conventional scenarios that varied widely in content. Although each demographic or cultural factor sometimes yielded a statistically significant difference in the predicted direction (e.g., men giving more utilitarian judgments than women; religious individuals giving more deontological/rule-based judgments than atheists), these differences were consistently associated with extremely small effect sizes. We conclude that gender, education, politics and religion are likely to be relatively insignificant for moral judgments of unfamiliar scenarios. We discuss these results in light of current debates concerning the mechanisms underlying our moral judgments and, especially, the idea that we share a universal moral sense that constrains the range of cross-cultural variation.A wide variety of cultural and demographic factors appear to influence our morally relevant actions. In virtually every society, men commit more crimes, especially violent crimes, than women do. It has often been suggested that

Moral Judgments in Russian Culture: Universality and Cultural Specificity

“…On the other hand, similarities observed across cultures suggest the possibility of universal principles (Nisbett and Cohen, 1996;Gert, 2004;Henrich et aL, 2005Henrich et aL, ,2006Hauser, 2006;Haidt, 2007). For example, in two studies involving thousands of subjects tested on the internet, Häuser and colleagues (Häuser et al, 2007;Banerjee et al, 2010) found that religion, education, gender, political affiliation and age (among adults) played virtually no role in the pattern of Judgments, across a wide range of moral scenarios. These studies suggest that certain aspects of our moral psychology may be relatively immune to demographic and cultural factors.…”

Armchair‐Friendly Experimental Philosophy

“…Meanwhile, empirical work has also confirmed the stability of intuition in the moral domain, with one recent large-scale study showing relatively little variation by gender, politics, religion and level of education (Banerjee, Huebner, and Hauser 2010).…”

Neuroanatomical correlates of forgiving unintentional harms

“…Some recent work shows that participants are slower and exhibit poor focus on the task while in scanner as opposed to the lab environment, though this difference was observed for a perceptual decision-making task93 and its relevance for social decision-making remains unclear. Future studies can also explore how variety of other demographic details94 (Big Five personality traits, education, ethnicity, etc.) and more realistic contexts95 affect moral judgments rather than relying primarily on a uniform group university students and hypothetical text vignettes as sampled in the current study.…”