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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. 

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. 

When observing others’ behavior, people use Theory of Mind to infer unobservable beliefs, desires, and intentions. And when showing what activity one is doing, people will modify their behavior in order to facilitate more accurate interpretation and learning by an observer. Here, we present a novel model of how demonstrators act and observers interpret demonstrations corresponding to different levels of recursive social reasoning (i.e. a cognitive hierarchy) grounded in Theory of Mind. Our model can explain how demonstrators show others how to perform a task and makes predictions about how sophisticated observers can reason about communicative intentions. Additionally, we report an experiment that tests (1) how well an observer can learn from demonstrations that were produced with the intent to communicate, and (2) how an observer’s interpretation of demonstrations influences their judgments.