The Psychological Values Underlying Redistributive Behavior

Economic inequality is an urgent issue which many societies are becoming increasingly confronted with. In spite of the dire consequences of allowing inequality persist unabated, efforts to mitigate inequality via redistribution typically fail, often because economically disadvantaged people oppose the very redistributive policies which would improve their lives. This counterintuitive finding has posed challenges to existing theories of human behavior, leading many to speculate that it is fairness, not material interest, which underlies redistributive choice. In the current study, we propose a novel experimental paradigm to assess how both fairness and self-interest impact redistributive choice. In an online sample of 231 participants, we demonstrate that the choice of redistributive tax rate was impacted by both factors. However, employing a computational modeling approach, we also find evidence that strategic norms underlie redistributive choice, both in choices observed in the laboratory and the policy views that participants hold.