The Effect of Conflicting Moral and Legal Rules on Bargaining Behavior: The Case of No-Fault Divorce
By Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, February 8, 2012
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Under contemporary no-fault divorce laws, it is impermissible to factor marital misconduct, a highly salient component of many divorces, into decisions about how to allocate joint property between the parties. We hypothesize that the no-fault law is in conflict with a moral intuition that favors punishment for people who break the marriage contract, and that people will be either unwilling or unable to fully ignore marital fault in the context of divorce settlement negotiations. In four web-based experiments, we asked subjects to read vignettes about divorcing couples, and then to rate proposals by each party about how to divide the marital property. We found that subjects rated wrongdoers
