Moral credentials and the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary: no evidence that endorsing female candidates licenses people to favor men
Journal
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Subject
Organisational Behaviour
Publishing details
Publication Year
2021
Abstract
Endorsing Obama in 2008 licensed some Americans to favor Whites over Blacks––an example of moral self-licensing (Effron et al., 2009). Could endorsing a female presidential candidate in 2020-21 similarly license Americans to favor men at the expense of women? Two high-powered, pre-registered experiments found no evidence for this possibility. We manipulated whether Democrat participants had an opportunity to endorse a female Democratic candidate if she ran against a male candidate (i.e., Trump in Study 1, N = 2,143; an anti-Trump Republican or independent candidate in Study 2, N = 2,228). Then, participants read about a stereotypically masculine job and indicated whether they thought a man should fill it. Contrary to predictions, we found that endorsing a female Democrat did not increase participants’ tendency to favor men over women for the job. We discuss implications for the robustness and generalizability of moral self-licensing.
Keywords
Moral credentials; Moral licensing; Gender bias; Sexism; Voting
Available on ECCH
No
