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Recommendation

A gender difference in effort moralization?

ORCID_LOGO based on reviews by Jared Celniker
A recommendation of:

See me, judge me, pay me: Gendered effort moralization in work and care

Abstract

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Submission: posted 03 March 2025
Recommendation: posted 20 May 2025, validated 20 May 2025
Cite this recommendation as:
Fillon, A. (2025) A gender difference in effort moralization?. Peer Community in Registered Reports, 101009. https://doi.org/10.24072/pci.rr.101009

This is a stage 2 based on:

See me, judge me, pay me: Gendered effort moralization in work and care
Leopold H. O. Roth, Tassilo T. Tissot, Thea Fischer, S. Charlotte Masak
https://osf.io/rz6yu

Recommendation

Effort moralization is the well-known idea that, unrelated to actual performance, people making more effort are judged better, attributed more morality and seen as better collaborators than people making less effort. However, previous studies on this topic mostly used vignettes with a man or a neutral protagonist. The current study by Roth et al. (2025) tackled the gender problem by testing the difference in attribution morality between a man and a woman protagonist, and two contexts: a “care” and a “work” context, mirroring the stereotypes associated with men and women.
 
The authors included two different and adequate power analyses, various interpretation of the possible effects, and filtering to ensure a high quality of data collection. They also provide a supplementary repository including the qualtrics survey, R script, and simulated data.
 
By using a conceptual replication of a study by Celniker et al. (2023), the results indicated strong support for a generalization of the effort moralization theory in a work context. However, for the "care" scenario, the result was mixed, and might be due to the moral evaluation of the effort. Results were more surprising for the gender effect, as the results did not indicate difference by gender, and no interaction between gender and scenario. Therefore, the effect could be related to a work context that does not involve morality and seems to be generalizable across gender.
 
The Stage 2 manuscript was evaluated over two rounds of in-depth review. Based on ​detailed responses to the reviewers’ and the recommender’s comments, the recommender judged that the manuscript met the Stage 2 criteria and awarded a positive recommendation.

URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/xd87r
 
Level of bias control achieved: Level 6. No part of the data or evidence that was used to answer the research question was generated until after IPA.
 
List of eligible PCI RR-friendly journals:
 
 
References
 
Celniker, J. B., Gregory, A., Koo, H. J., Piff, P. K., Ditto, P. H., & Shariff, A. F. (2023). The moralization of effort. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152, 60–79. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001259
 
Roth, L. H. O., Tissot, T. T., Fischer, T. & Masak, S. C. (2025). See me, judge me, pay me: Gendered effort moralization in work and care [Stage 2]. Acceptance of Version 3 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/wkbs6_v3
PDF recommendation pdf
Conflict of interest:
The recommender in charge of the evaluation of the article and the reviewers declared that they have no conflict of interest (as defined in the code of conduct of PCI) with the authors or with the content of the article.

Reviews

Evaluation round #2

DOI or URL of the report: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/wkbs6_v2

Version of the report: 2

Author's Reply, 16 May 2025

Dear Adrien,

thank you very much for your suggested changes and for keeping an eye on the details, while navigating us through this project.

We adapted all suggested changes by you in the manuscript and updated the pre-print accordingly.

Hopefully, we did so appropriately.

Have a good end of the week, and we are looking forward to hearing back from you.

Best regards

Leopold

https://doi.org/10.24072/pci.rr.101009.ar2

Decision by ORCID_LOGO, posted 13 May 2025, validated 13 May 2025

Dear researchers,

I read your answer to both reviewers and think that you answered properly.

Below you can find an annotated version of your manuscript. Most of my comments are typo's corrections but I also think that you can discuss a bit more the exclusion of participants who did not perceived the effort situation and have a look at the abstract and conclusion regarding a "contrary to previous studies" that was screened by the reviewer Jared Celniker.

Looking forward to receiving a final version,

Adrien Fillon

Download recommender's annotations
https://doi.org/10.24072/pci.rr.101009.d2

Evaluation round #1

DOI or URL of the report: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/wkbs6_v1

Version of the report: 1

Author's Reply, 02 May 2025

Decision by ORCID_LOGO, posted 10 Apr 2025, validated 10 Apr 2025

Dear authors,

The two reviewers of the stage 1 agreed to review the manuscript once again. They both agreed that the manuscript is consistent between the stages. They still both have suggestions to improve the discussion and found several modifications to perform.

I attached to this message reviewer's 2 review (called Stage 2 Review.docx).

When submitting the next version, please add a response to reviewer letter explaining your changes regarding the reviewer's comments.

Good luck with the revision,


Adrien Fillon

 

Download recommender's annotations
https://doi.org/10.24072/pci.rr.101009.d1