PONE-D-19-25204

Title: Accuracy of Consensual Stereotypes in Moral Foundations: A Gender Analysis

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Inam,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please find the reviewers' comments below, as well as those from my own.

We would appreciate receiving your revised manuscript by Dec 19 2019 11:59PM. When you are ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter.

To enhance the reproducibility of your results, we recommend that if applicable you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io, where a protocol can be assigned its own identifier (DOI) such that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). This letter should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. This file should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. This file should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Manuscript'.

Please note while forming your response, if your article is accepted, you may have the opportunity to make the peer review history publicly available. The record will include editor decision letters (with reviews) and your responses to reviewer comments. If eligible, we will contact you to opt in or out.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Valerio Capraro

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

1. When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at http://www.journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and http://www.journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2. Thank you for your ethics statement: "Written informed consent was taken to record their willingness. Informed consent was provided by the departmental ethics review committee, which was developed according to ethical standards of American Psychological Association."

- Please amend your current ethics statement to include the full name of the ethics committee/institutional review board(s) that approved your specific study.

- Once you have amended this/these statement(s) in the Methods section of the manuscript, please add the same text to the “Ethics Statement” field of the submission form (via “Edit Submission”).

For additional information about PLOS ONE ethical requirements for human subjects research, please refer to http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-human-subjects-research.

3. We note that you have indicated that data from this study are available upon request. PLOS only allows data to be available upon request if there are legal or ethical restrictions on sharing data publicly. For more information on unacceptable data access restrictions, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions.

In your revised cover letter, please address the following prompts:

a) If there are ethical or legal restrictions on sharing a de-identified data set, please explain them in detail (e.g., data contain potentially sensitive information, data are owned by a third-party organization, etc.) and who has imposed them (e.g., an ethics committee). Please also provide contact information for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent.

b) If there are no restrictions, please upload the minimal anonymized data set necessary to replicate your study findings as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and provide us with the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories.

We will update your Data Availability statement on your behalf to reflect the information you provide.

Additional Editor Comments:

I have now collected two reviews from two experts in the field. The reviewers like the paper but suggest several improvements. Therefore, I would like to invite you to revise your manuscript according to their comments. Additionally, I would like to add one more comment regarding the literature review, which ignores the enormous literature on gender differences in various domains of morality. For example: gender differences in moral judgments in moral dilemmas (Fumagalli et al. 2010; Friesdorf et al. 2015; Capraro & Sippel, 2017), gender differences in honesty (Capraro, 2018; Abeler et al. 2019; Gerlach et al. 2019); gender differences in cooperation (Rand, 2017); gender differences in altruism (Rand et al. 2016; Branas-Garza et al. 2018). Of course it is not a requirement to cite these specific works, but I think that, anyway, the literature review on gender differences should be highly improved.

I am looking forward for the revision.

References

J Abeler, D Nosenzo, C Raymond (2019) Preferences for truth‐telling. Econometrica 87 (4), 1115-1153

P Brañas-Garza, V Capraro, E Rascón-Ramírez (2018) Gender differences in altruism on mechanical turk: Expectations and actual behaviour. Economics Letters 170, 19-23

V Capraro (2018) Gender differences in lying in sender-receiver games: A meta-analysis. Judgment and Decision Making 13, 345-355

V Capraro, J Sippel (2017) Gender differences in moral judgment and the evaluation of gender-specified moral agents. Cognitive processing 18 (4), 399-405

Friesdorf, R., Conway, P., & Gawronski, B. (2015). Gender differences in responses to moral dilemmas: a process dissociation analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(5), 696-713.

Fumagalli, M., Ferrucci, R., Mameli, F., Marceglia, S., Mrakic-Sposta, S., Zago, S., ... & Cappa, S. (2010). Gender-related differences in moral judgments. Cognitive processing, 11(3), 219-226.

Gerlach, P., Teodorescu, K., & Hertwig, R. (2019). The truth about lies: A meta-analysis on dishonest behavior. Psychological bulletin, 145(1), 1.

DG Rand, VL Brescoll, JAC Everett, V Capraro, H Barcelo (2016) Social heuristics and social roles: Intuition favors altruism for women but not for men. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 145 (4), 389-396

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Partly

**********

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

**********

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

**********

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Summary

The contribution investigated in a 300 Pakistani adults the moral stereotypes that males and females hold about each other and the influences of gender in such moral stereotypical representations using the Moral Foundation Questionnaire (MFQ30). Participants were asked in two times to respond (1) for themselves (actual score) and (2) how a typical member of the other gender group, according to their perception, would answer (other gender stereotypes score). The Females scored higher than Males only on the Care Foundation sub-scale. Females underestimated Stereotypes about Males on the Harm and Fairness foundations; Males were accurate on Fairness foundation of Females, whereas underestimated their Authority foundation.

Comments

In general the topic of the consensual stereotypes about moral foundation attributed to the other gender group, is relevant and not yet studied. The theoretical frame is pertinent and the relevance of the study is also well motivated by the recent spread of anti-sexist movements not only in the western world. Nevertheless I was surprised by the absence of any mention to the debate about the cross-cultural differences in the people morality judgement (e.g. Graham et al., 2011 for East- West differences in foundation endorsement, even if as the effect sizes in their results showed, the gender differences were much stronger than the differences between Eastern and Western cultures).

It could be necessary for introducing this study to propose some considerations and references about the main characteristics of Pakistani culture which certainly influences the relationships between genders and may partly explain possible differences across gender stereotypes. In fact expectations about the specificity of cultural context of participants are missing, nor this relevant aspect has been sufficiently covered in the discussion. At last in the Introduction Section would be useful to refer to empathy disposition, as a recognized discriminant factor between several cross gender dimensions.

.

Moreover I have concerns about some aspects of the methodological approach.

1. The choice of the sample, constituted in prevalence by university students, is not representative of the Pakistani population. This must be acknowledged among the limitations of the study;

2. Alpha coefficients for single scale in the sample examined are missing;

Minor points:

1. Why in all tables the average scores (Actual and Stereotypes scores) of Males (MA vs, SAM) and Females (SAF vs. FA) are reported in a different order? This is confusing.

2. The labels of the 5 moral Foundations are differently used in the different parties of the text. For example the Harm/Care sub-scale in prevalence is called simply Care sub-scale, sometimes it is called Harm sub-scale. On the other side, Graham et al. in their validation study of MFQ (2011) called the 5 sub-scales using the first label for each couple (Harm, Fairness, In-group, Authority, Purity). For more clarity and consistency in the interpretation of the results obtained, according to my opinion it would be better using always the complete labels of the 5 moral bi-dimensional Foundations (Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, In-group/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, Purity/Sanctity).

Reviewer #2: In the manuscript the authors present one study aimed at examining consensual moral stereotypes that women and men hold about each other. The topic is innovative and contributes to the literature on social judgment and morality. It is also interesting to read findings about the Pakistani population since to my knowledge, most studies on morality concern populations from Western countries. I have however some concerns, regarding, in particular, how the study is presented at the conceptual level.

Indeed, I do not understand why the study is presented as a research on stereotype accuracy. According to Jussim et al. (2015), who are cited in the manuscript, the assessment of stereotype accuracy implies a comparison between people’s beliefs about a group and some criteria that establish group characteristics (i.e., more objective data such Census data about the proportion of people who have certain characteristics or perform specific behaviors). In the present manuscript, such a comparison is not done. If I understood well, the authors claim that a “standard of comparison” can be represented by ratings of women and men about themselves. However, it seems to me that these can be intended as self-construal ratings rather than criteria that allow to grasp stereotype accuracy. This is my major concern. I think a different framework for the research would increase the impact and the readability of the paper.

I would also stress the importance of collecting such data in the Pakistani context, and would discuss in a deeper way how these results can be specific for that context (or can be generalized to others). This argument might also be developed in the future directions section.

With respect to the implications of the research, the authors anticipate in the introduction the importance of exploring morality and related stereotypes in the light of the #MeToo movement. I think a similar reasoning should be moved to (and expanded in) the discussion.

Moreover, I find that the very last paragraph of the discussion should be expanded. The authors should provide more reasoning on the practical implications of this study.

Minor points:

I find it very hard to follow the section results due to the numerous acronyms used in the Tables (MA, SAM, SAF, FA)

I am not an English-native speaker, but I have the impression that the manuscript would benefit from a linguistic revision. Moreover, to my knowledge the APA style does not use male and female as nouns, but only as adjectives. I would rather use women and men as nouns.

**********

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: Yes: Carmen Belacchi

Reviewer #2: No

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files to be viewed.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email us at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

PONE-D-19-25204R1

Title: Accuracy of Consensual Stereotypes in Moral Foundations: A Gender Analysis

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Inam,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

We would appreciate receiving your revised manuscript by Mar 13 2020 11:59PM. When you are ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter.

To enhance the reproducibility of your results, we recommend that if applicable you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io, where a protocol can be assigned its own identifier (DOI) such that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). This letter should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. This file should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. This file should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Manuscript'.

Please note while forming your response, if your article is accepted, you may have the opportunity to make the peer review history publicly available. The record will include editor decision letters (with reviews) and your responses to reviewer comments. If eligible, we will contact you to opt in or out.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Valerio Capraro

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

One reviewer still has some minor suggestions. Please address them at your earliest convenience. I am looking forward for the final version.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

**********

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: In the revised version, the authors have addressed the points raised by me and the other reviewer. In particular, I appreciated the adding of more considerations and references to the Pakistani context, which help understand and contextualize the findings.

I only have few concerns, which are outlined below.

With respect to gender differences in morality, the authors mostly reported studies on moral judgment. Even though I agree that there has been little research on morality in gender stereotypes, I suggest that the authors look at and eventually add the evidence of Leach, Carraro, Garcia, & Kang (2017) on stereotype of women as more trustworthy than men; Sheppard and Johnson (2019) on attractiveness and trustworthiness; Moscatelli, Menegatti et al. (2020, advanced online publication on Sex Roles) on the importance of morality for women in employment evaluation. Other studies that have shown differences in morality between women and men are Franke, Crown, & Spake, 1997; Lippa, 1998; Muehlheusser, Roider, & Wallmeier, 2015.

Basing on the mentioned evidence, I would be more cautious than saying “…since no published work could be found on the topic of moral stereotypes and gender” (lines 152-154). I would rather say that the evidence on this issue is rare.

At the end of the introduction, the authors highlighted some limitations of the study. While I appreciate this part, I think they should just mention these limitations and discuss them more in depth (for instance, the last sentence, line 189-192) in the limitations section in the discussion (which is embedded in the text at the moment).

I would rename the section “Materials and Methods” as “Method”.

In the discussion, line 343, I cannot understand the sentence “…where people could large amounts of…”

I would avoid reporting statistics in the discussion (d values), could they be moved to the results section?

**********

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files to be viewed.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email us at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Title: Accuracy of Consensual Stereotypes in Moral Foundations: A Gender Analysis

PONE-D-19-25204R2

Dear Dr. Inam,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it complies with all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you will receive an e-mail containing information on the amendments required prior to publication. When all required modifications have been addressed, you will receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will proceed to our production department and be scheduled for publication.

Shortly after the formal acceptance letter is sent, an invoice for payment will follow. To ensure an efficient production and billing process, please log into Editorial Manager at https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the "Update My Information" link at the top of the page, and update your user information. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to enable them to help maximize its impact. If they will be preparing press materials for this manuscript, you must inform our press team as soon as possible and no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

With kind regards,

Valerio Capraro

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: