An official website of the United States government
What is the fair way to distribute resources? Past research documents widespread egalitarianintuitions. Charitable donations show the prevalence of redistributive concerns. For recentcontractualist accounts of moral cognition, however, moral judgments should coincide with whatrational agents would agree to in a negotiation, and reflect each party’s relative bargainingpower. How can these perspectives be reconciled? We suggest a key difference lies in whetherthe logic of bargaining drives the underlying interaction, turning existing asymmetries intobargaining power differences. Participants (n = 887) make third-party judgments about themorally best split of a fixed amount. When the context is one of bilateral (Study 1) or third-party(Study 2) negotiation, moral judgments overwhelmingly track bargaining power differences, andcan be predicted with striking quantitative precision. In a closely matched donation setting inwhich the logic of bargaining is irrelevant, moral intuitions are completely reversed, insteadreflecting redistributive or egalitarian concerns.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2026
Moral judgment is sensitive to bargaining power.
For contractualist accounts of morality, actions are moral if they correspond to what rational or reasonable agents would agree to do, were they to negotiate explicitly. This, in turn, often depends on each party’s bargaining power, which varies with each party’s stakes in the potential agreement and available alternatives in case of disagreement. If there is an asymmetry, with one party enjoying higher bargaining power than another, this party can usually get a better deal, as often happens in real negotiations. A strong test of contractualist accounts of morality, then, is whether moral judgments do take bargaining power into account. We explore this in vive preregistered experiments (n = 3,025; U.S.-based Prolific participants). We construct scenarios depicting everyday social interactions between two parties in which one of them can perform a mutually beneficial but unpleasant action. We find that the same actions (asking the other to perform the unpleasant action or explicitly refusing to do it) are perceived as less morally appropriate when performed by the party with lower bargaining power, as compared to the party with higher bargaining power. In other words, participants tend to give more moral leeway to parties with better bargaining positions and to hold disadvantaged parties to stricter moral standards. This effect appears to depend only on the relative bargaining power of each party but not on the magnitude of the bargaining power asymmetry between them. We discuss implications for contractualist theories of moral cognition and the emergence and persistence of unfair norms and inequality.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2417241
- PAR ID:
- 10623899
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Psychological Association
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
- Volume:
- 154
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 0096-3445
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 263 to 278
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
ABSTRACT Contractualist moral theories view morality as a matter of mutually beneficial agreements among rational agents. Compared to its rivals in moral philosophy–consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics–contractualism has only recently started to attract attention in empirical work on the cognitive science of morality. Is it fruitful to adopt a contractualist lens to better understand how moral cognition works? After introducing the main contractualist theories in contemporary moral philosophy, I present five reasons to take inspiration from this family of normative theories to develop descriptive accounts of morality. Then, I review how the contractualist framework has been used to contribute to our understanding of moral cognition at three interrelated levels of analysis: Morality's evolutionary logic, its cognitive organization, and the specific cognitive processes and forms of reasoning involved in moral judgment and decision making. First, several evolutionary accounts of morality argue that its evolutionary logic must be understood in contractualist terms. Second, resource‐rational contractualism proposes that the subcomponents of moral cognition–including well‐studied rule‐ and outcome‐based mechanisms, and much less studied agreement‐based processes–are organized to efficiently approximate the outcome of explicit negotiation under resource constraints. Third, recent empirical developments suggest that three characteristically contractualist forms of reasoning–virtual bargaining, we‐reasoning, and universalization–can be involved in producing moral judgments and decisions in a variety of contexts. Beyond the traditional distinction between rules and consequences, these various research programs open a third way for the cognitive science of morality, one based on agreement. This article is categorized under:Psychology > Reasoning and Decision MakingEconomics > Interactive Decision‐MakingPhilosophy > Valuemore » « less
-
null (Ed.)Abstract Morality has two key features: (1) moral judgments are not solely determined by what your group thinks, and (2) moral judgments are often applied to members of other groups as well as your own group. Cooperative motives do not explain how young children reject unfairness, and assert moral obligations, both inside and outside their groups. Resistance and experience with conflicts, alongside cooperation, is key to the emergence and development of moral obligation.more » « less
-
Research in empirical moral psychology has consistently found negative correlations between morality and both risk-taking, as well as psychopathic tendencies. However, prior research did not sufficiently explore intervening or moderating factors. Additionally, prior measures of moral preference (e.g., sacrificial dilemmas) have a pronounced lack of ecological validity. This study seeks to address these two gaps in the literature. First, this study used Preference for Precepts Implied in Moral Theories (PPIMT), which offers a novel, more nuanced and ecologically valid measure of moral judgment. Second, the current study examined if risk taking moderates the relationships between psychopathic tendencies and moral judgment. Results indicated that models which incorporated risk-taking as a moderator between psychopathic tendencies and moral judgment were a better fit to the data than those that incorporated psychopathic tendencies and risk-taking as exogenous variables, suggesting that the association between psychopathic tendencies and moral judgment is influenced by level of risk-taking. Therefore, future research investigating linkages between psychopathic tendencies and moral precepts may do well to incorporate risk-taking and risky behaviors to further strengthen the understanding of moral judgment in these individuals.more » « less
-
Moral behavior is more prevalent when individuals cannot easily distort their beliefs self-servingly. Do individuals seek to limit or enable their ability to distort beliefs? How do these choices affect behavior? Experiments with over 9,000 participants show prefer- ences are heterogeneous—30 percent of participants prefer to limit belief distortion, while over 40 percent prefer to enable it, even if costly. A random assignment mechanism reveals that being assigned to the preferred environment is necessary for curbing or enabling self-serving behavior. Third parties can anticipate these effects, sug- gesting some sophistication about the cognitive constraints to belief distortion.more » « less
