Moral credentials and the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary: no evidence that endorsing female candidates licenses people to favor men

Giurge, L M, Lin, H-L E and Effron, D (2021) Moral credentials and the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary: no evidence that endorsing female candidates licenses people to favor men. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 95 (July). p. 104144. ISSN 0022-1031

Abstract

Endorsing Obama in 2008 licensed some Americans to favour Whites over Blacks––an example of moral self-licensing (Effron et al., 2009). Could endorsing a female presidential candidate in 2020-21 similarly license Americans to favour 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 = 2,143; an anti-Trump Republican or independent candidate in Study 2, N = 2,228). 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 favour men over women for the job. We discuss implications for the robustness and generalizability of moral self-licensing.