The Redistributive Principles Model: converging evidence for moral pluralism in redistributive choice

In recent years, the steady rise of economic inequality across the globe has accompanied an ever-increasing focus on the question of redistribution. Though the majority of people believe that economic inequality is a problem, decisions to redistribute resources are typically highly contentious. Previous research which has explored this paradox between beliefs and behavior in redistributive choice has largely relied upon an untested assumption that redistributive preferences are derived from perceptions about pre-existing inequality. In the current study, we propose an alternative model of redistributive psychology – the Redistributive Principles Model – which posits that both perceptions of inequality as well as stable moral preferences underlie decisions about economic redistribution, and we adopt a multi-methodological approach to test this model. In two experiments – a large behavioral experiment (N = 231) and a direct fMRI follow-up experiment (N = 50) – we implemented the Redistributive Principles Model as a computational model of decision-making, and show that it captures redistributive decisions in our novel socioeconomic task, and offers new insights into the specific moral principles employed in redistributive choice. We demonstrate that the task-elicited preferences intuitively explain views on real-world redistributive policies, that each of the redistributive principles identified was associated with a distinct pattern of neural activation, and that these moral preferences were identifiable in distinct neuroanatomical phenotypes. Backed by computational, neural, and political data, the Redistributive Principles Model advances a novel hypothesis about the psychological processes underlying redistributive behavior.