Thinking the unthinkable: sacred Values and taboo cognitions
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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