Sex Differences in Moral Judgments? A Test of Gilligan's Theory

Abstract

This study was designed to test Gilligan's (1982) claim that men and women differ in moral judgments. One hundred and one college students read four traditional moral dilemmas and rated the importance of 12 considerations for deciding how the protagonist should respond. Six of the statements were derived from the description by Kohlberg et al. (1978) of post-conventional moral reasoning, and six were derived from Gilligan's description of women's style of moral reasoning. Subjects also rated themselves on a measure of sex-typed personality attributes. There were no reliable sex differences on either of the types of moral reasoning, and confidence intervals allowed the rejection of all but negligible differences in the directions predicted by Gilligan's model. Furthermore, men and women showed highly similar rank orders of the items for each dilemma. The personality measures also failed to predict individual differences in moral judgments.