Sex-Related Moral Behavior

The moral sense is one of the most complex aspects of the human mind. While neurobiological, cognitive and behavioural gender-related differences are increasingly studied and verified, the common belief that morality differs between men and women has not been experimentally investigated. We assessed the impact of gender on moral choices by testing thirty men and thirty women with the Moral Sense Task (MST) (Greene _et al_. 2001, 2004; Koenigs _et al_. 2007). Whereas the two genders did not differ in utilitarian responses to non-moral dilemmas (NM) and to impersonal moral dilemmas (MI), men gave significantly more utilitarian answers to personal moral dilemmas (MP; i.e. that action whose endorsement involves highly emotional decision). These results suggest that the cognitive-emotional processes implied in the evaluation of personal moral dilemmas differ between men and women, possibly reflecting differences in the underlying neural mechanisms. The existence of sex-related determinants of moral judgement may be one of the factors responsible for gender differences in real-life behaviours involving power management, economic decision-making, leadership and aggressive and criminal behaviours