Transcript Thinking the unthinkable: sacred Values and taboo cognitions

By: Philip E. Tetlock
Polynesian standards for taboo – absolute,
automatic, unreasoned aversion to any breach of
the barriers separating profane from sacred
 Limitation of resources can cause the secular to
seem more important or just as important as the
sacred.



Finite resources versus placing prices on something
sacred
Tetlock “defined sacred values as those values
that a moral community treats as possessing
transcendental significance that precludes
comparisons, trade-offs, or indeed any mingling
with secular values.”
 People
try to protect sacred values, as well
as their public images, by avoiding taboo
thoughts and actions.
 Moral-outrage
hypotheses
 Moral-cleansing hypotheses
 Reality-constraint hypotheses
 People
tend to have adverse reactions to
individuals that do not protect or go against
sacred values.

Includes cognitive, affective, and behavioral
components
 It
is considered wrong to think about
comparing what is secular to what is sacred.


Taboo trade-offs – secular values versus sacred
values
Longer contemplation = harsher the reaction
 Having
taboo thoughts can cause a person to
feel guilty and aim to compensate for having
those thoughts.

Simply the mere act of contemplating engaging
in actions that are against sacred values can
cause a person to feel contaminated.
 The
longer one contemplates taboo actions,
the more tainted one feels.
 When
presented with constraints, people
search for rhetorical redefinitions of
situations into more acceptable routine
trade-offs or tragic trade-offs.


Example: if parents dedicated their net worth to
their children’s safety, they would make
themselves poor.
Example: if a government were to provide stateof-the-art health care to all citizens, it would use
all of its GDP.
 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00fhjn
b (10:05 - 11:41)
 Forbidden
base rates and heretical
counterfactuals
 Tetlock et al. (2000) looked at base rates in
relation to race when setting premiums.

Found that people were angry at executives that
set premiums based on race, but were not angry
at executives that set premiums without
considering race.
 Tetlock
et al. (2000) also looked at heretical
counterfactuals when applied to the
founders of sacred movements.

Found that people do not want secular rules to
be applied to sacred beings.
 Tragic
trade-offs – sacred value versus sacred
value
 Tetlock et al. (2000) looked at people’s
judgments of a hospital administrator’s
decision. (tragic versus taboo trade-offs)

Found that there was a worse reaction to
someone who spent more thought on a taboo
trade-off and a better reaction to someone who
spent more thought on a tragic trade-off.
 Connection
to crash and cannibalism
 In
a world with scarce resources, someone
(usually the political elite) must set
priorities, which includes setting monetary
values on sacred values.

Sacred values are merely pseudo-sacred


Reframing of taboo trade-offs to seem like tragic
or routine trade-offs


Sale of organs study
Sale of organs study
Look the other way when it is not paraded in
front of them.

Toxic-waste study