The social contract in the laboratory. An experimental analysis of self-enforcing impartial agreements

Abstract

Social contract theories are based on the idea of the “consent of the governed,” according to which norms, rules and institutions, constitutions in particular, must be based on the general consensus (or unanimous consent) of the individuals who are subject to the regulation. The article reports the results of an experiment aimed at identifying the conditions for the emergence of a self-enforcing social contract in the laboratory. Our main result is that spontaneous compliance with a non-self-interested norm of distribution is likely to occur if individuals have been part of the same process of ex ante agreement on the distributive norm under a ‘veil of ignorance,’ to which the emergence of reciprocal expectations of conformity is also related. This is in line with Rawls’s idea of an endogenous ‘sense of justice’ stabilizing ex post institutions that would have been ex ante chosen in the original position.