Differences on Utilitarian and Moral Decision Between Male and Female

Abstract

Objective.
Moral judgments are based on decisions that take into account the representation of norms and law,
values, functionality and situations themselves. Morality has been studied with “hypothetic moral dilemmas”, in
order to identify the type of outcome and the process behind moral reasoning. But judgments by themselves are
not enough to establish differences in the type of resolution or the relationship with other cognitive processes.
The present paper aimed to compare performance in tasks of utility maximization, cognitive control, and moral
judgments, taking into account sex and other sociodemographic variables.
Method.
Seventy-three university
students participated (50 women, 20 men and 3 with unreported gender, the average age was 19.53 years (
SD
=
1.68 years). The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) was used to identify behaviors of utility maximization. In addition, we
used the switch costs and the web application of moral machine tasks.
Results.
A difference between variables
of the IGT, but no differences in the switch costs task were found.
Conclusion.
Regarding moral judgment,
males gave more value to respect norms than females. Some variables of the IGT task support outcomes related
to differences between sexes. Results are congruent with differences shown in existing literature.