Moral judgment is sensitive to bargaining power

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; 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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).