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You’re given a time machine. What’s the first thing you do?

If your idea is to travel back in time to assassinate Adolf Hitler, you’re not alone. It’s such a common impulse that it has become a trope that “everybody kills Hitler on their first trip.”

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The Nazi leader oversaw the systematic murder of six million Jews — about three quarters of Europe’s Jewish population — as well as millions of communists, homosexuals, Roma people, and other “enemy” groups. The war he started in 1939 eventually claimed the lives of some 50 million people around the world.

It’s not surprising then that, given a time-machine, many people would choose to go back and take the Führer out of commission to prevent his crimes. But is it that simple? (No.)

A group of researchers recently looked at responses from more than 6,000 subjects in trying to determine how people resolve moral dilemmas. One scenario asked whether people would travel to the 1920s and kill Hitler — before Mein Kampf, before he had a mass following and long before he put his genocidal plans into practice. As the researchers discovered, more men than women were willing to commit this act if it meant forestalling war and massacre. Women, however, were more likely to feel conflicted over what to do, and having to commit murder was more likely to convince them to let Hitler live.