Experimental jurisprudence—a nascent research program that applies the tools of experimental social science to investigate people’s intuitions about fundamental legal concepts and institutions—has already made significant contributions to our theoretical understanding of areas such as causation, consent, and the relationship between law and morality. However, the methodological repertoire of this young field remains limited, relying predominantly on vignette-based surveys in which participants self-report their reactions to short hypothetical scenarios.
While fruitful, this approach may overlook crucial dimensions of the legal domain, especially its inherently social character—such as the ways in which legal concepts and institutions are embedded in mutual expectations among relevant agents. Incentivized behavioral experiments, which are well-suited to study such socially embedded contexts, remain rare in experimental jurisprudence (cf. Hannikainen et al. 2022; Bystranowski et al. 2025; see also Dyrda & Bystranowski 2025).