Alexander Max Bauer

Needs play a key role in many fields of social sciences and humanities, ranging from normative theories of distributive justice to conceptions of the welfare state. Over time, different conceptions of what counts as a need (i. e., what is considered a normatively relevant need) have been proposed. Many of them include (in one way or the other) needs for survival, decency, belonging, and autonomy. Little work has been done on how these kinds of needs are evaluated in terms of their significance for distributive justice. To begin closing this gap, we investigate the role of the four aforementioned kinds of needs for impartial observers. We do so in two empirical studies. The first study asks participants to evaluate the importance of each of the four kinds of needs separately. We find that different levels of importance are attributed to the kinds of needs, which places them in a hierarchy. The second study asks participants to make distributive decisions. Results further support the hierarchy found in the first study and, additionally, reveal that participants tend to make coherent allocation decisions.

To investigate the impact of framing on rule-breaking in social dilemmas, we incorporated a rule in a 1-shot resource game with 2 framing treatments: in one frame, we offered a give-some dilemma (i.e., a variant of a public goods game), and in the other frame, a take-some dilemma (i.e., a variant of a commons dilemma game). In each frame, all participants were part of 1 single collective sharing a common good. Each participant was initially equipped with 1 of 5 different endowments of points from which they must give/were allowed to take amounts to/from the common good. The rule established outcome equality between participants by prescribing the exact amounts of what to give/take to/from the common good, which was finally divided equally among participants. Participants decided whether to cooperate and comply with the rule or to break the rule to their own advantage and to the detriment of the collective (i.e., giving lower/taking higher amounts). The results of an online experiment with 202 participants showed a significantly higher proportion of individuals breaking the rule in the take-some dilemma than in the give-some dilemma. In addition, endowment size influenced the proportion of rule-breaking behavior in the take-some dilemma. However, the average amounts of points not given/taken too much were not different between the 2 dilemma types.