How Does Competition Affect Men’s Morality?
Research shows that men and women tend to make different moral choices. Men are more willing to sacrifice the life of another person to save the lives of a larger group. Women generally disagree that inflicting harm for the purpose of a greater good is acceptable. As a philosopher of ethics might put it, men are more utilitarian than women. They are happy to inflict suffering on a smaller group in order to minimise suffering for a larger group.
Bastien Trémolière of the University of Toulouse in France wondered whether it might be possible to switch men from their usual utilitarian stance to be more anti-utilitarian by tweaking their circumstances in such a way as to increase male-male competition.
He asked male and female volunteers to imagine that they were forced to either sacrifice three persons of their same sex, or one person of the opposite sex. Which would they choose? So, men were asked: would you rather sacrifice three men or one woman? Women were asked: would you rather sacrifice three women or one man?
How would the volunteers respond, and how would different types of competitive situation impact on their choices?
First of all, Trémolière asked his volunteers to respond to the moral dilemma as if they lived in a large city, the remote countryside, or a spaceship. These might sound like a bizarre and unrelated set of places, but the idea was to give the sense that potential partners might differ in their scarcity. It’s easier to find a partner in a city than in the countryside, and easier in the countryside than on board a rocket blasting off into oblivion. Especially if you’re stuck up there with an endlessly weeping and daughter-obsessed Matthew Mahogany. If I was locked in a shuttle with that berk, I’d have sacrificed him out of the nearest airlock before we reached the ionosphere.
Trémolière found that men were more likely than women to make the anti-utilitarian moral choice. In other words, they were more willing to sacrifice three people of their own gender to save one person of the opposite sex. They were also more likely to do this when they imagined themselves in a spaceship, a scenario where competition over potential partners is likely to be strongest. In that situation about half of the men were more willing to sacrifice the many for the few, something Mr. Spock would certainly not approve of.
In the city and the country scenarios, only around 25% of male volunteers were happy to sacrifice three of their fellow men for a single woman. Women were more likely to make the anti-utilitarian choice in space than in the country or a city, but never more than 20% of them did so. For women, the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few.
In a follow up study, Trémolière hypothetically locked another set of volunteers on his hypothetical spaceship and had them answer the same hypothetical question: if you were forced to either sacrifice three persons of the same sex, or one person of the opposite sex, which would you choose? This time he had the volunteers report their sexuality. Would the gay men respond differently to the straight men? Of course, gay men compete for same-sex partners while straight men compete for opposite-sex partners.
Trémolière found that his gay astronauts only made the anti-utilitarian choice 19% of the time, as opposed to % of the time for the straight spacefarers. Translation: straight men have no use for other chaps: bung ‘em out the airlock, tout suite.
In a final experiment, the volunteers were told that all the people in their spaceship were either 30 years old or 50 years old. Older women have less of their reproductive lifespan remaining to them. We should expect men to feel more sexually competitive when thinking about younger rather than older women. As we might have predicted, 72% of men were all for sacrificing three other men to save one 30 year old woman, but only 47% of men made the same choice when the men and woman were in their 50s. It’s hard to know which choice is the more moral: is it better to make the utilitarian choice to save three men in exchange for sacrificing one woman, when you know the man making the choice is basing his reasoning on whether the woman is old enough to have attended a Boy George gig?
Women were much more principled. The age of the hypothetical men and women didn’t matter to them: only 44% of the female volunteers were willing to blast three women into the black void of space to save a single man.
The other 56% made the right, right, right decision. Bye bye, McConaughey, you absolute whingebag. How about you go and look for Jessica Chastain outside?
Trémolière, B., Kaminski, G., & Bonnefon, J.-F. (2015). Intrasexual competition shapes men’s anti-utilitarian moral decisions. Evolutionary Psychological Science, 1(1), 18–22. Read summary
The content of this post first appeared in the 2 June 2015 episode of The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.
