I pose the following hypothetical scenario:
The year is 2020. Mark Zuckerberg has just unveiled the latest feature on Facebook: time travel. But before he can put it into use, he needs a test subject. So, Mark Zuckerberg in all his almighty wisdom comes to you, and he says, “despite your lack of knowledge in the field of time-travel, computers, German, German history, stealth operations, and killing people, we’d like you to test this new feature that involves traveling back in time. Oh and by the way, we’re going to have you kill Hitler while you’re there.”
Confronted with this ethical dilemma, would you accept?
According to a psychological study published by Sage, men are more likely to accept a very basic version of this hypothetical than women. The research shows that, given the opportunity, women generally feel uncomfortable with the idea of killing one person to save millions, while men are much more open to compromising their morals if it means bettering society.
“Women seem to be more likely to have this negative, emotional, gut-level reaction to causing harm to people in the dilemmas to the one person, whereas men were less likely to express this strong emotional reaction to harm,” says lead research author Rebecca Friesdorf, a social psychology student at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.
The academic study, which was a meta-analysis of 40 different studies posing a series of moral dilemmas, was conducted by researchers from the United States, Canada, and Germany. 6,100 people were polled and asked questions on topics ranging from murder and torture, to lying and animal testing.
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