Need, equity, and accountability

Bauer, Alexander Max; Meyer, Frauke; Romann, Jan; Siebel, Mark; Traub, Stefan

doi:10.1007/s00355-022-01410-w

Cited by 11 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 77 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…We thus need a vignette that is vivid but not part of their everyday life. A former study has shown that the given vignette seems to be well-suited for this purpose (see [19]).…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

“…As recent research has pointed out (see, e. g., [18,19]), needs are not only relevant for normative reflections, but have also been the subject of numerous empirical studies. Think, for example, of early empirical social choice (see, e. g., [20]) and what followed from it (for a review, see [21]).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In accordance with the classification presented in the Literature review, participants are told that a person can need the wood either for survival, decency, belonging, or autonomy. We present four short vignette texts (the vignette's scenario is adapted from [19]), each exemplifying one of those kinds of needs: A person can need the wood to • survive the upcoming winter. This means that if they receive less wood than they need, it will become so cold in their hut that they are very likely to fall life-threateningly ill.…”

Section: Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Winter is coming: How laypeople think about different kinds of needs

Bauer,

Romann,

Siebel

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Needs play a key role in many fields of social sciences and humanities, ranging from normative theories of distributive justice to conceptions of the welfare state. Over time, different conceptions of what counts as a need (i. e., what is considered a normatively relevant need) have been proposed. Many of them include (in one way or the other) needs for survival, decency, belonging, and autonomy. Little work has been done on how these kinds of needs are evaluated in terms of their significance for distributive justice. To begin closing this gap, we investigate the role of the four aforementioned kinds of needs for impartial observers. We do so in two empirical studies. The first study asks participants to evaluate the importance of each of the four kinds of needs separately. We find that different levels of importance are attributed to the kinds of needs, which places them in a hierarchy. The second study asks participants to make distributive decisions. Results further support the hierarchy found in the first study and, additionally, reveal that participants tend to make coherent allocation decisions.

show abstract

“…We thus need a vignette that is vivid but not part of their everyday life. A former study has shown that the given vignette seems to be well-suited for this purpose (see [19]).…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Winter is coming: How laypeople think about different kinds of needs

Bauer,

Romann,

Siebel

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Information on the potential neediness of individuals appears to raise allocations. Subjects with higher needs receive larger shares of the resource in hypothetical decision situations (Bauer et al, 2022 ; Gaertner & Schokkaert, 2012 ; Konow, 2001 ; Yaari & Bar-Hillel, 1984 ). Water and food sharing occurs more frequently when recipients need water or are deprived of food (Brewis et al, 2019 ; Kause et al, 2018 ; van Dillen et al, 2021 ).…”

Section: Transparency In Distributive Decisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

More Satisfaction, Less Equality: Distributive Effects of Transparent Needs in a Laboratory Experiment

Kittel,

Neuhofer,

Schwaninger

2024

Soc Just Res

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Societies are confronted with the dilemma that need satisfaction requires transparent individual needs. We study the effect of information about others’ needs on the distribution of a joint endowment in a three-player network exchange game in a laboratory experiment. Need levels are exogenously given and either transparent (known to all three network members) or opaque (only known to the players themselves). The three players negotiate in dyads until two players agree on a distribution. We expect that the transparency of need thresholds raises need satisfaction but lowers equality. The results suggest that the members of the dyad who agree on the distribution can satisfy their own need thresholds even when information about thresholds is opaque. The effect of transparency on the remaining network member is antithetical: while transparency increases the rate of need satisfaction, it decreases the average share of allocations when needs are low. In the opaque condition, allocated shares are larger, but need satisfaction is lower. This reveals the ambivalent distributive effects of transparent need thresholds: Transparency helps those with the highest need thresholds, but it can hurt those with lower need thresholds, and it barely affects the ones with the most influence on the decision.

show abstract

“…Any account of BN‐related trade‐offs will again crucially depend on general methodological decisions (see Siebel & Schramme, 2020 ). For example, proponents of needs theories have regarded normative principles as justified based on their own a priori normative intuitions (Wiggins, 1998 ), assumptions about the normative intuitions of ordinary people (Braybrooke, 1987 ; Copp 1995 , 1998 ) and scientific data about these intuitions (Bauer et al., under review ; Brock, 2005 ; Hassoun, 2009 ; Miller 2007 , 2020 ). Personally, I favor drawing at least partly on scientific evidence.…”

Section: The Normativity Of Basic Needsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Basic needs in normative contexts

Pölzler

2021

Philosophy Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In answering normative questions, researchers sometimes appeal to the concept of basic needs. Their guiding idea is that our first priority should be to ensure that everybody is able to meet these needs—to have enough in terms of food, water, shelter, and so on. This article provides an opinionated overview of basic needs in normative contexts. Any basic needs theory must answer three questions: (1) What are basic needs? (2) To what extent do basic needs generate reasons for action and how are these reasons to be understood? (3) How are basic needs and their satisfaction to be measured? I address these questions in turn. Then I also briefly discuss the theoretical potential of appealing to basic needs in normative contexts. It turns out that future research in this area could benefit from a higher degree of interdisciplinarity and methodological reflection, and that, generally speaking, basic needs theories are more promising than they have often been claimed to be.

show abstract

Need, equity, and accountability

Cited by 11 publications

References 77 publications

Winter is coming: How laypeople think about different kinds of needs

Winter is coming: How laypeople think about different kinds of needs

More Satisfaction, Less Equality: Distributive Effects of Transparent Needs in a Laboratory Experiment

Basic needs in normative contexts

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About