Winter is Coming How Laypeople Think About Different Kinds of Needs Alexander Max Bauer, a* Jan Romann, b Mark Siebel, a and Stefan Traub c a Department of Philosophy, University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany b Faculty of Technology, University of Applied Sciences Emden/Leer, Emden, Germany c Department of Economics, Helmut-Schmidt-University, Hamburg, Germany Abstract: Needs play a key role in many őelds of social sciences and humanities, ranging from normative theories of distributive justice to conceptions of the welfare state. Over time, diferent conceptions of what counts as a need (i. e., what is considered a norma- tively 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 signiőcance 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 őrst study asks participants to evaluate the importance of each of the four kinds of needs separately. We őnd that diferent 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 őrst study and, additionally, reveal that participants tend to make coherent allocation decisions. Keywords: Basic Needs, Coherence, Distributive Justice, Equality, Equity, Rationality ∗ Corresponding author. Department of Philosophy, University of Oldenburg, Ammerländer Heer- straße 114ś118, 26129 Oldenburg, Germany, alexander.max.bauer@uni-oldenburg.de. Telephone: +49 (0)441 798 2034. The authors were members of the research group łNeed-Based Justice and Distributive Proceduresž (FOR 2104) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG Grants SI 1731/2 - 2, TR 458/6 - 2). We are indebted to the support and input throughout all project phases by participants of FOR 2104 meetings. Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4383555