Case Report
Moral credentials and the 2020 democratic presidential primary: No evidence that endorsing female candidates licenses people to favor men☆,☆

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104144Get rights and content

Highlights

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    We investigated moral licensing in the 2020 US Democratic presidential primaries.

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    We predicted that endorsing a female candidate would license Democrats to favor men.

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    Two high-powered, pre-registered studies did not support this prediction.

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    Bayesian analysis showed that the data were more consistent with a null effect.

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    Neither participant gender nor gender attitudes moderated this null effect.

Abstract

Endorsing Obama in 2008 licensed some Americans to favor Whites over Blacks––an example of moral self-licensing (Effron, Cameron, & Monin, 2009). Could endorsing a female presidential candidate in 2020–21 similarly license Americans to favor men at the expense of women? Two high-powered, pre-registered experiments found no evidence for this possibility. We manipulated whether Democrat participants had an opportunity to endorse a female Democratic candidate if she ran against a male candidate (i.e., Trump in Study 1, N = 2143; an anti-Trump Republican or independent candidate in Study 2, N = 2228). Then, participants read about a stereotypically masculine job and indicated whether they thought a man should fill it. Contrary to predictions, we found that endorsing a female Democrat did not increase participants' tendency to favor men over women for the job. We discuss implications for the robustness and generalizability of moral self-licensing.

Section snippets

Method

We pre-registered this study at aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=a3q2kr and collected data between March 3rd–7th, 2020.

Study 2

Study 1 suggests that endorsing a female presidential candidate did not license Democrat participants to indicate that a man was better suited than a woman for a stereotypically masculine job (i.e., no evidence for moral licensing). Study 2 aimed to address a potential methodological explanation for this effect: Perhaps Study 1's materials made participants interpret their choice of a woman as inadequate evidence of their non-sexism. We considered two versions of this explanation. First,

General discussion

Two high-powered, pre-registered experiments found no evidence that endorsing a female presidential candidate licensed Democrats to express a more-stereotypical hiring preference. This effect emerged regardless of participants' gender, attitudes towards women, or motivation to respond without sexism. Whereas endorsing Obama in 2008 licensed voters to favor Whites over Blacks (Effron et al., 2009), and rejecting sexist statements licensed participants to favor men over women for a hypothetical

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    ☆

    Data, code, experimental materials, and pre-registration documents are available via the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/ja83x/.

    ☆

    This paper has been recommended for acceptance by Professor. Rachel Barkan.

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