More men than women would kill Hitler

If given the opportunity, men are more likely than women to travel back in time and kill Hitler, a recent study found.

Researchers asked over 6,000 participants a range of moral questions, including whether they would kill a young Adolf Hitler to avert World War II.

According to the results published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in February, even though both men and women calculated the consequences and benefits of killing someone to prevent future deaths, women were more likely to feel conflicted over committing murder.

“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,” lead researcher Rebecca Friesdorf told NPR earlier this month.

Friesdorf found that women generally tended to agonize over making the difficult moral decisions, because they were more likely to balance the outcome against following societal rules.

In contrast, men were found to be more utilitarian in their approach to moral decision making, and were more concerned with the long-term consequences.

Researchers asked participants 20 moral dilemmas involving committing harm for the greater good. The questions included hypothetical scenarios of torture, murder, abortion, lying and animal testing.