Study Shows Men More Likely To Use Time Machines To Kill Hitler

A new study brought together researchers from all over the world, and the results are in: women cannot be trusted to use time machines.

Researchers from the U.S., Canada, and Germany applied meta-data analysis to 40 previous studies (6,100 participants), interpreting the previous findings where participants were asked questions of a moral nature, such as whether or not they would kill Germany’s former dictator, Adolf Hitler. Findings from the meta-data analysis have disproved a long held theory that ‘women never let anything go’, as women were less likely than men to use a time machine to go back in history and kill the man responsible for tens of millions of deaths.

From NPR:

You find a time machine and travel to 1920. A young Austrian artist and war veteran named Adolf Hitler is staying in the hotel room next to yours. The doors aren’t locked, so you could easily stroll next door and smother him. World War II would never happen.

But Hitler hasn’t done anything wrong yet. Is it acceptable to kill him to prevent World War II?

This is one moral dilemma that researchers often use to analyze how people make difficult decisions. Most recently, one group re-analyzed answers from more than 6,000 subjects to compare men’s and women’s responses. They found that men and women both calculate consequences such as lives lost. But women are more likely to feel conflicted over what to do. Having to commit murder is more likely to push them toward letting Hitler live.

“Women seem to be more likely to have this negative, emotional, gut-level reaction to causing harm to people in the dilemmas, to the one person, whereas men were less likely to express this strong emotional reaction to harm,” Rebecca Friesdorf, the lead author of the study, tells Shots. A master’s student in social psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Friesdorf analyzed 40 data sets from previous studies. The study was published Friday in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

So it’s settled then: women will never get to use time machines. If not to go back in time and kill people like Hitler, what the hell would the purpose of a time machine even be?!?! If women cannot be counted on to use the machine for the only good purpose it was designed for, then they shouldn’t be allowed to use it at all!

Other questions were also pretty off the wall, and with equally as straight-forward answers (hint: kill the pornographer):

“You are the head of a poor household in a developing country. Your crops have failed for the second year in a row, and it appears that you have no way to feed your family. Your sons, ages 8 and 10, are too young to go off to the city where there are jobs, but your daughter could fare better.

“You know a man from your village who lives in the city and who makes sexually explicit films featuring girls such as your daughter. In front of your daughter, he tells you that in one year of working in his studio, your daughter could earn enough money to keep your family fed for several growing seasons.

“Is it appropriate for you to employ your daughter in the pornography industry in order to feed your family?”

“Very few people say yes you should do it, even though it will save the rest of the family,” says Friesdorf.

What kind of messed up experiment was this? How is this considered ‘science’?!

[Haaretz via NPR]