Many governments and charities adopt Rawlsian difference principle by maximizing the welfare of the least advantaged and giving priority to equality over efficiency. There are two views about which domain the principle should be applied to. The first applies it to the final distribution of income. Previous empirical studies have focused on this but found little evidence supporting it. The other view linked the principle with Rawlsian primary goods: Since the cost of losing primary social goods is huge, people will maximize the benefit of the least advantaged behind the veil of ignorance, such that everyone has access to necessary means. According to the latter reading of Rawls, we experimentally imposed a great cost for losing primary goods, and observed a salient majority of subjects obeying this principle, unlike previous studies finding a minority. Moreover, even if we lowered the cost for losing primary goods, more than one-third of the subjects still adopted this principle.

中文翻译：

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正义，金钱能买到什么：关于初级社会产品和罗尔斯差异原理的实验室实验

许多政府和慈善机构采用罗尔斯差异原则，通过最大限度地提高弱势群体的福利并优先考虑平等而不是效率。关于该原则应应用于哪个领域，有两种观点。第一种是将其应用于收入的最终分配。以前的实证研究关注这一点，但几乎没有证据支持它。另一种观点将这一原则与罗尔斯的基本利益联系起来：由于失去基本社会利益的代价是巨大的，人们会在无知的面纱下最大化最弱势者的利益，这样每个人都可以获得必要的手段。根据罗尔斯的后一解读，我们实验性地为失去初级商品付出了巨大的代价，并观察到绝大多数受试者都遵守这一原则，不像以前的研究发现少数。而且，即使我们降低了失去初级商品的成本，仍有超过三分之一的受试者采用了这一原则。