Neurolinguistic Priming and Gender Stereotype Effects in the Ratings of Justice vs. Authority Moral Violations: Republicans and Democrats

Abstract

ABSTRACT An experimental method for assessing gender biases was used to compare Republicans’ and Democrats’ ratings of moral violations in the domains of justice vs. respect for authority. Four experimental conditions of a text-based survey instrument manipulated the gender of the protagonist and the location of the first instance of gender information in single-sentence moral violation vignettes. Results were consistent with the theoretical time course of neurolinguistic gender priming and the hypothesized influence of implicit stereotypes on moral judgments. Republicans demonstrated a gender bias in ratings of authority violations by rating violations committed by girls and women as worse when compared to a pronoun only condition. Democrats demonstrated the opposite bias by rating authority violations committed by boys and men as worse when compared to violations committed by girls and women. No significant bias was found for any of the justice violation conditions for either Republicans or Democrats.