Clarifying Gender Differences in Moral Dilemma Judgments: The Complementary Roles of Harm Aversion and Action Aversion
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Moral dilemmas entail situations where decisions consistent with deontological principles (following moral rules) conflict with decisions consistent with utilitarian principles (maximizing overall outcomes). Past work employing process dissociation (PD) clarified that gender differences in utilitarianism are modest, but women are substantially more deontological than men. However, deontological judgments confound two motivations: harm aversion and action aversion. The current work presents a mega-analysis of eight studies ( N = 1,965) using PD to assess utilitarian and deontological response tendencies both when deontology entails inaction and when it requires action, to assess the independent contributions of harm aversion and action aversion. Results replicate and clarify past findings: Women scored higher than men on deontological tendencies, and this difference was enhanced when the deontological choice required refraining from harmful action rather than acting to prevent harm. That is, gender differences in deontological inclinations are caused by both harm aversion and action aversion.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it