Anastasiia Grigorev

And women and children simply act as stand-in for civilians.

Now, harming civilians is bad, we all know that, and people tend to get upset when there are civilian targets.

So we actually tested whether it is something about women and children per se, or is it about them standing in for civilians by comparing the two groups directly.

And we find that even then, women and children still amplify moral outrage, even relative to civilians.

So this does seem to suggest that there is something special about these two groups.

For sure.

So the rut is generally two camps of sexism, so to speak.

One is your traditional hostile sexism, thinking that women are bad and, you know, trying to ruin your life in some ways.

But there is this idea of benevolent sexism, which, as you highlight, made on the surface, at least, seem pretty nice.

It's believing that women are refined or morally pure and have greater moral sensibility.

But it also prescribes how we should treat women.

For instance, put women on the pedestal or protect them when something bad happens.

And they tend to go hand in hand, where if you think that women are these great, wonderful beings, you might also want to protect them at all costs, even at the expense of others, most likely men.

Yeah, no, motherhood is definitely a big role of it.

And you can argue that a woman really is complying with benevolent sexism if she is, if she decides to become a mother and she might be viewed as really living up to this ideal of womanhood.

And we actually were interested in that too.

Perhaps when people hear something like women and children, they're actually thinking about mothers and children.

And maybe that's where they're feeling morally outraged because we as a society actually do think about mothers as a pretty sacred role.

This is not what we find.

What we find is whether women are mothers or non-mothers, they still amplify moral outrage relative to men.