Intuitive moral judgments are robust across variation in gender, education, politics, and religion: A large-scale web-based study

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 (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. Introduction. 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 gender-based differences in morally relevant behavior and moral decision-making arise early in development, with boys exhibiting a focus on matters of justice, and girls tending to focus on matters of care (Gilligan, 1982; Gilligan & Attanucci, 1988). Of course, trenchant and compelling criticisms have been raised against this sort of perspective (Kohlberg, 1981, 1984; Walker, 1984); but explorations of juvenile delinquency and aggressive behavior appear to bear out the presumption of gender-based differences in the context of moral behavior and, especially, the likelihood of moral transgressions involving harm to others (Moffitt, Caspi, Rutter & Silva, 2001). Both educators and developmental psychologists have carried out interventions where children are taught moral reasoning skills. Such interventions often rely on the presentation of hypothetical moral scenarios, or games in which children engage in prosocial activities, followed by a discussion of the morally relevant aspects of a behavior (Hromek & Roffey, 2009; Schiaefli, Rest, & Thomas, 1985). In these cases, researchers have often claimed that moral development critically depends on the presence of teachers who can guide young minds to think clearly and act rationally. In line with this experimental research, it is commonly suggested that the return to moral life after committing a crime crucially depends on moral education (MacPhail, 1989). Similarly, it is often suggested that educators must intervene during a student’s medical career to provide information about the importance of care, compassion, and the consideration of alternatives—otherwise it is assumed that problematic behaviors will be evoked by the pressures to succeed (Branch, 2000). In short, across a wide range of domains, differences in education appear to have a significant impact on morally relevant behavior. Finally, religious and political backgrounds have frequently been treated as critical factors in motivating morally relevant behavior and providing a structure for morally relevant decisions. It is commonly held that religion is necessary, if not synonymous with morality; on this view, scripture provides the source of moral judgments and the impetus for morally commendable behavior. It is often assumed, from this perspective, that the atheist will be unable to live a moral life because atheists have no religious structures to inform them about which actions call for moral blame (e.g., murder, theft), moral praise (e.g., compassionate altruism), and no specifiable reasons to feel guilt or resentment. In line with this age-old perspective, recent experimental evidence suggests that religious experience directly affects morally relevant behavior, as when participants implicitly primed with “God” are more generous in economic games, and less likely to cheat, than neutrally primed participants (Berring, 2006; Randolph-Seng & Nielsen, 2007). Similarly, several studies reveal that conservatives make different moral judgments than liberals, especially where disgust sensitivity fuels differences in attitudes toward hot-button topics like gay marriage and abortion (Haidt & Graham, 2007; Inbar, Pizzarro, & Bloom, 2009). We adopt a different approach to examining the relationship between demographiccultural variation and the structure of our intuitive moral psychology. In these studies, we ask whether participants with different backgrounds tend to offer divergent judgments about hypothetical and unfamiliar moral scenarios. Using data from a large-scale internet study, with approximately 9000 participants and 145 different moral scenarios, we explore the contribution of gender, education, political affiliation and religion to intuitive moral judgments in these sorts of cases.