A choice behind a veil of ignorance

The philosopher John Rawls argued that to choose fair principles for a society, you should imagine choosing them without knowing which position you'll end up in. Rich or poor, lucky or unlucky — strip those facts away and ask: what rule would you want governing the distribution?

That's the setup here. You'll pick a principle for distributing income before knowing which income class you'll be assigned to. Your income is determined by a random class draw made after you choose, so the rule you pick is the rule you live under, whoever you turn out to be.

This is a teaching adaptation of Frohlich, Oppenheimer & Eavey (1987), who ran a version of this experiment with real participants and real money. Their original framing left the veil mostly unexplained on purpose — to avoid priming subjects toward Rawls's preferred answer. We're more upfront about it here because the point is to understand the setup, not to replicate the experimental conditions.