Collaboration is essential to social life. Sometimes teams, families, companies, and other organizations agree on explicit rules governing such collaboration, and these are backed by moral force: To violate the rule is wrong. Other times, however, we find ways to collaborate on the fly, without rules or norms, or even explicit communication. This often requires inferring a joint plan — imagining “what coordination would we agree to, if we could?” — and playing our surmised role. Is it also considered morally wrong to violate an implicit or inferred joint plan? In five preregistered experiments (n = 1,506), we show that deviating from an inferred joint plan is perceived as morally problematic, even without prior communication or agreement. In other words, just as the agreements we actually make are morally binding, so too are the patterns of conduct that we infer our social partners would agree upon.

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 five preregistered experiments (n = 3,025; US-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.

People solve a myriad of coordination problems without explicit communication every day. A recent theoretical account, virtual bargaining, proposes that, to coordinate, we often simulate a negotiation process, and act according to what we would be most likely to agree to do if we were to bargain. But very often several equivalent tacit agreements — or virtual bargains — are available, which poses the challenge of figuring out which one to follow. Here we take inspiration from virtual bargaining to develop a cognitive modeling framework for dynamic coordination problems. We assume that players recognize their common goal, identify one or more possible tacit agreements based on situational features, observe the history of their partner’s choices to infer the most likely tacit agreement, and play their role in the joint plan. We test this approach in two experiments (n = 125 and n = 133) based on a dynamic coordination game designed to elicit agreement-based behavior. We fit our model at the individual level and compare its performance against alternative models. Across four different conditions, our model performs best among the set of models considered. Behavioral results are also consistent with players sustaining coordination and cooperation in the task by converging on tacitly agreed strategies or “virtual bargains”.

The social-contract tradition of Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls has been widely influential in moral philosophy but has until recently received relatively little attention in moral psychology. For contractualist moral theories, ethics is a matter of forming, adhering to, and enforcing (hypothetical) agreements, and morality is fundamentally about acting according to what would be agreed by rational agents. A recent psychological theory, virtual bargaining, models social interactions in contractualist terms, suggesting that we often act as we would agree to do if we were to negotiate explicitly. However, whether such contractualist tendencies (a propensity to make typically contractualist choices) and forms of reasoning (agreement-based cognitive processes) play a role in moral cognition is still unclear. Drawing upon virtual bargaining, we develop two novel experimental paradigms designed to elicit incentivized decisions and moral judgments. We then test the descriptive relevance of contractualism in moral judgment and decision making in five preregistered online experiments (n = 4,103; English-speaking Prolific participants). In the first task, we find evidence that many participants show contractualist tendencies: their choices are “characteristically” contractualist. In the second task, we find evidence consistent with contractualist reasoning influencing some participants’ judgments and incentivized decisions. Our findings suggest that a propensity to act as prescribed by tacit agreements may be particularly important in understanding the moral psychology of fleeting social interactions and coordination problems. By complementing the rich literature on deontology and consequentialism in moral psychology, empirical approaches inspired by contractualism may prove fruitful to better understand moral cognition.

We show that patience is a key determinant of subjective well-being differences between countries. To address potential endogeneity bias, we apply an instrumental variable approach using the share of Protestants in the country, which prior literature has associated with patience and used as an instrument. While tentative, our findings are consistent with a sizable causal effect of patience on subjective well-being. They are robust across several specifications and hold for three different measures of subjective well-being: life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect.