{"pk":50043,"title":"How the logic of bargaining shapes moral judgments about resource divisions","subtitle":null,"abstract":"For recent contractualist accounts of moral cognition, moral judgments should coincide with what rational agents would agree to in a negotiation, accounting for their relative bargaining positions. But past research documents widespread egalitarian moral intuitions; impartiality may also require abstracting away from power asymmetries. How can these perspectives be reconciled? We suggest a key difference lies in whether the logic of bargaining drives the interaction, turning existing asymmetries into bargaining power differences. In Study 1, two parties engage in a take-it-or-leave-it negotiation. In Study 2, they can trade with a third party. In both cases, third-party moral judgments about the morally best split of a fixed amount overwhelmingly favor the advantaged party. They can be precisely predicted using classic models from bargaining theory. By contrast, moral intuitions are completely reversed—reflecting redistributive or egalitarian concerns—in a donation setting where the logic of bargaining does not apply.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Psychology; Social cognition; Computational Modeling"}],"section":"Abstracts with Poster Presentation (accepted as Abstracts)","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6426h8cq","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Xavier","middle_name":"","last_name":"Roberts-Gaal","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":""},{"first_name":"Arthur","middle_name":"","last_name":"Le Pargneux","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":""},{"first_name":"Fiery","middle_name":"","last_name":"Cushman","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T19:00:00+01:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/50043/galley/38005/download/"}]}