Passengers of the Titanic row to safety aboard a lifeboat in the movie "Titanic." CREDIT:AP

People generally think that women’s welfare should be preserved over men’s, according to a new study published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Researchers conducted a series of experiments in which subjects were presented with scenarios in which their choices could lead to a (real or hypothetical) person being harmed in some way.

For example, in one experiment a group of subjects was given £20 and told that any money they held at the end of the experiment would be multiplied up to 10 times.

In the course of the experiment the subjects interacted with other individuals. They were told that if they decided to keep the money, these individuals would be subjected to mild electric shocks, but if they gave up the money, no shocks would be administrated.

Women were less likely than men to be subjected to shocks, suggesting an aversion to harming females - even when this came at the subjects’ own financial expense. While both female and male subjects were less likely to shock women than men, women in particular were less willing to shock other women.

Subjects were also asked questions such as: “On a sinking ship, whom should you save first? Men, women, or no order”; and “According to social norms, how morally acceptable is it to harm men/women for money?”

Overall, the answers of both female and male respondents suggested that social norms account for greater harming behavior toward a male than a female target.

“There is indeed a gender bias in these matters: society perceives harming women as more morally unacceptable,” explains co-author Dean Mobbs, an assistant professor of psychology at Columbia University.

The study was conducted at Cambridge University’s Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and Columbia University.

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