Unconditional basic income and social preferences: some evidence from the lab

The purpose of this article is to experimentally analyze the assumed links between individuals’ social preferences and their support for a basic income, based on three possible types of preferences: efficiency-oriented, egalitarian, and maximin. To this end, we designed an original experimental protocol at the intersection of two strands of literature: one well-established, dealing with social preferences, and the other more recent and still emerging, focused on basic income. Our experiment yields two main findings. First, participants identified as having maximin-type social preferences significantly tend to choose a distribution including a basic income. Second, participants identified as efficiency-oriented or egalitarian deviate from their usual preference type in favor of the basic income whenever it provides a maximin type distribution. These two results clearly support a justification of basic income in maximin terms, thus following the theoretical argument put forward by Van Parijs.