Questions of distributive justice are not only important for the understanding of various political outcomes (e.g. tax laws) and the development of generally accepted social policies but are also core for our understanding of human nature. The main aim of the contribution is to find out who relies on which principles of justice (equality, merit and need) when and why? In order to address problems of social desirability bias and to measure people’s justice attitudes in a direct manner, a modified version of a survey experiment was developed. In this modified design, respondents are asked to distribute a specified amount of money among three people described in vignettes (including indicators for need and merit, as well as information such as sex and ethnic background). This methodological approach combines the possibilities of distribution tasks in laboratory settings with the interdependency and visual presentation of a choice experiment and the convenient metric outcomes of factorial surveys. It also allows us to consider the complex interplay of individual-level, contextual and situational factors in the formation of justice attitudes. Since the experiment is embedded in a PAPI or online questionnaire, the results of the survey experiment can be analysed in combination with other questions and socio-demographic variables. Another advantage of the method is that the situation can easily be adapted, in this case to include distributions among family members, friends, students applying for scholarships and at the workplace. Furthermore, the amount to be distributed was varied in order to test if it matters for the respondents; the assumption being, that a lower amount will force participants to focus on one principle, while a higher amount will allow them to use a more fine-grained distributional rule. For external validity and as a means of testing the influences of context, the survey was distributed among a random sample of the Swiss general population, as well as to two student populations at the University of Bern, Switzerland and the University of Princeton, USA. Preliminary results show: (1) The situation for which respondents are asked to distribute resources substantially shapes the choice of the primary justice principle applied to the task. For example, respondents were approximately three times as likely to apply the equality principle in the family setting compared to any other situation. (2) Context matters! The geographical region in which the respondents were socialised affects the way they perceive distributional justice. (3) Individual level factors such as sex, age and class background are also important predictors of attitudes towards distributional justice. The results are mainly in line with self-interest motives and reduction of cognitive dissonance mechanisms (e.g. upper class people and men are more in favour of the merit principle than lower class people and women). (4) What is more, vignette people were treated unequally based on their ethnicity. (5) Further analyses are expected to provide additional insight and help uncover the underlying mechanisms. We can then fit the existing pieces of the puzzle, add to it and achieve a broader picture and generalizability.