How social relationships shape moral judgment

[pmberkeley]

It would be interesting to see this study fully sex-disaggregated. In my experience, sex roles and perspectives end up coloring most of these judgments, and it did look like the MC/FC distance hurt your overall correlation coefficient there, which would speak to this potential muddying of the strength of your observations. For example, if men see strangers as people you don't have to care about at all, and women as ones you have to care about somewhat, that bimodal distribution may completely resolve into distinct distributions with higher predictive power for moral judgments. It could also change depending on who the respondent is picturing in the interaction (my hypothesis is the sex of the pictured interactee is going to be the primary way the relationship might skew the answer). You see a whisper of that on the Mating/Stranger relationship. It may be there that men are more likely to picture a romantic partner as a stranger and therefore more towards appropriate than pure neutral, whereas women might have stronger mores against mating with strange men or they may be more likely to picture a non-sexual interest as a stranger when they answer. Any factoring done at a purely statistical level may miss the nuance that full sex disaggregation in study design, and in data separation and reporting, might capture here. (But to look under the hood of that, it would be interesting to see the demographic clustering of answers).