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Moral gender differences have been discussed in terms of Kohlbergian stages and content of orientations and taken to correspond to universal stable male and female features. The present study instead focuses on moral motivation and explains differences in terms of role expectations. We assessed moral motivation in 203 adolescents by a newly developed rating procedure based on participants' open-ended responses to hypothetical moral conflicts and validated this measurement by two self-reports and one experiment. We used independent measures for the content of gender stereotypes and gender identification. Male stereotypes comprise mostly negative and morally unfavorable traits, female stereotypes mostly positive and morally favorable traits. A marginally significant relationship is found between high gender identification and low moral motivation in boys, not in girls. We take gender differences in moral motivation to result from an interaction between individually differing degrees of gender identification and content of culturally shared gender stereotypes.
Moral gender differences have largely been discussed in terms of Kohlbergian stages and content of moral orientation and taken to correspond to universal stable male and female features. The present study instead focuses on moral motivation and explains differences in terms of role expectations. In Study 1, a new measure for assessing strength of moral motivation is developed and validated that, more than previous measures, aims at tapping action dispositions. In Study 2, collectively shared gender stereotypes and individually differing degrees of gender identification are assessed independently and related to gender differences in strength of moral motivation.
Over the past thirty years, research on morality has focussed mainly on moral reasoning following Kohlberg's (1981,1984) original assumption of a cognitive-affective parallelism in moral functioning. Theoretical analyses (Blasi, 1980,1983; Rest, 1986,1999) and more recent empirical work (Colby & Damon, 1992; Nunner-Winkler 1998; Thoma, 1986; Walker, 1999; Walker, deVries, &Trevethan, 19 87), how ever, suggest that moral reasoning and moral motivation are partially independent dimensions. In consequence, researchers today explicitly address the "relative neglect of moral character and virtues" in Kohlberg's model (Walker & Pitts, 1998, p. 403) and consider the study of moral motivation an "important complement and extension" of work on moral reasoning (Pratt, Hunsberger, Pancer, & Alisat, 2003, p. 582). Our study follows up on this interest and ties it in with the widely...