People think women are morally superior to men

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Abstract

Decades of scholarship on gender have shown that women are judged to be more caring and more communal than men. Here we use multiple methods (N = 5,376) to test an intriguing claim entailed by this work: People think that women are morally superior to men. Using reverse-correlation methods, we show that mental representations of the face of “a morally good person” is a woman’s face. Next, using a novel profile-generation task, we find that people are more likely to ascribe more morally good traits to women than to men, both when they are spontaneously thinking of a woman (vs. a man) and when they are assigned to do so. Further, using a large database of 1,864 normed behaviors, we find that behaviors associated with moral goodness are also stereotyped as feminine. Finally, we use a novel impression updating task to explore a potential consequence of this phenomenon. Specifically, we find that immoral behavior is more diagnostic for women than men. As a result, equivalent moral transgressions lead to larger negative character updating for women than for men. In sum, these findings reveal that moral goodness is closely linked to gender concepts: people think women are morally superior to men.

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