Thinking the unthinkable: sacredvalues and taboo cognitions

Philip E. Tetlock

University of California, Berkeley, USA

Many people insist that their commitments to certainvalues (e.g. love, honor, justice) are absolute and inviol-able – in effect, sacred. They treat the mere thought oftrading off sacred values against secular ones (such asmoney) as transparently outrageous – in effect, taboo.Economists insist, however, that in a world of scarceresources, taboo trade-offs are unavoidable. Researchshows that, although people do respond with moraloutrage to taboo trade-offs, they often acquiesce whensecular violations of sacred values are rhetoricallyreframed as routine or tragic trade-offs. The resultsreveal the peculiar character of moral boundaries onwhat is thinkable, alternately punitively rigid andforgivingly ﬂexible.

Thisarticlesummarizesanemergingbodyofresearchthatexplores how people cope – cognitively and emotionally –with a fundamental contradiction of social life. Thecontradiction can take diverse forms but its canonicalform can be stated simply. On the one hand, as economistsfrequentlyremindus,weliveinaworldofscarceresourcesinwhich,likeitornot,everythingmustultimatelytakeonanimplicitorexplicitprice[1].Indeed,thisaustereinsightprompted Oscar Wilde to define an economist as someonewho knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. On the other hand, sociological observers pointout that people often insist with apparently great convic-tion that certain commitments and relationships aresacred and that even to contemplate trade-offs with thesecularvaluesofmoneyorconvenienceisanathema[2].Inthe social world inhabited by most readers of this journal,to be caught calculating the opportunity costs of one’sfamily or professional integrity or loyalty to one’s countryis to reveal that one ‘just does not get it’ – that one simplydoes not understand what it means to participate in theserule-governed forms of social life in the roles of parent/ spouse, scientist or citizen.Wheneconomicnecessitycollideswithcultural-identityand moral-religious imperatives, and in the modern worldsuch collisions are common[3,4],the resulting dissonance can be excruciating. Finite resources sometimes requireplacing at least implicit dollar valuations on a host of things that society at large, or vocal ideological sub-cultures, adamantly declare non-fungible: human life(what price access to medical care?), justice (what priceaccess to legal representation?), preserving naturalenvironments (what price endangered species?), and civilliberties and rights (can ethnic–religious profiling toidentify terrorists be justified on Bayesian and cost–benefit grounds?). This article explores these issues in twosections. The first section offers a working definition of sacred values and a set of hypotheses concerning howpeople cope with secular encroachments on such values.Thesecondsectionsketchestheprincipallinesofempiricalwork bearing on these hypotheses.

Conceptual backdrop

Political philosophers – from Aristotle to Marx andNietzsche – have long speculated that citizens are morelikelytodowhattheyaresupposedtodoiftheybelievethemoral codes that regulate their lives are not arbitrarysocial constructions but rather are anchored in bedrock valuesthattranscendthewhimsofmeremortals.‘

Don’tdo x because I say so

’ has less impact than

‘don’t do x becauseGodsaysso

’. By the middle of the 20th century, prominentanthropologistsandsociologistshadmadethecomplemen-tary observation that, although there is vast variation inwhat groups hold sacred, sacredness seems to qualify as afunctional universal across societies, both primitive andmodern, and that moral communities erect a variety of psychological and institutional barriers to insulate sacred values from secular contamination[5,6].To jumpstart social-cognitive research on this topic,Tetlock

etal

.[7]defined sacred values as those values thata moral community treats as possessing transcendentalsignificance that precludes comparisons, trade-offs, orindeed any mingling with secular values. Of course, thepolicy a community proclaims towards a sacred valuerepresents an expressed, not a revealed, preference. Ouractual choices may belie our high-sounding proclamationsthatwehaveassignedinfiniteweighttothesacredvalue[8].Tetlock

et al

.[9]advanced a sacred value protectionmodel (SVPM) that asserted that, when sacred valuescome under secular assault, people struggle to protecttheir private selves and public identities from moralcontamination by the impure thoughts and deeds impliedinthetabooproposals.TheSVPMcanbecapturedinthreeinterrelated sets of propositions: moral-outrage hypoth-eses, moral-cleansing hypotheses, and reality-constrainthypotheses.

Moral outrage

Building on Durkheim’s[2]observations of how peoplerespond to affronts to the collective conscience as well as

Corresponding author:

Philip E. Tetlock (tetlock@haas.berkeley.edu).

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recent work on factors that inflate punitive damageawards[10–12], the SVPM model posits that when peoplediscover that members of their community have compro-mised sacred values, they experience an aversive arousalstate – moral outrage – that has cognitive, affective andbehavioral components: harsh trait attributions to norm violators, anger and contempt, and enthusiastic supportfor norm and meta-norm enforcement (punishing both violators and those who shirk their fair share of theburdensometaskofpunishingviolatorsforthepublicgood).Themodelalsopredictsderogationasafunctionofmerecontemplation. Traditional cognitive accounts trace thedifficulty people have been making trade-offs betweensecular values such as money and convenience and sacred values,suchasloveandloyalty,totheincommensurabilityproblem – the absence of a common metric for comparingsecular and sacred values[13]. The SVPM insists,however, that people find such trade-offs not onlycognitively confusing but morally disturbing and tracesthis reaction to a deeper or constitutive form of incom-mensurability. Our commitments to other people requireus to deny that certain things are comparable. Even tocontemplate attaching a finite monetary value to one’sfriendships, children, or loyalty to one’s country is todisqualify oneself from membership in the associatedmoralcommunity.Constitutiveincommensurabilityariseswhenever values are treated as commensurable subvertsone of the values in the trade-off calculus[14].Taboo trade-offs are, in this sense, morally corrosive. The longerobservers believe that a decision-maker has contemplatedan indecent proposal, the harsher their assessments of that person’s character, even if that person ultimatelymakes the ‘right’ choice and affirms the sacred value.

Moral cleansing

Resource constraints can bring people into disturbinglyclose psychological contact with temptations to compro-mise sacred values. The SVPM predicts that decision-makers will feel tainted by merely contemplatingscenarios that breach the psychological wall betweensecular and sacred and engage in symbolic acts of moralcleansing that reaffirm their solidarity with the moralcommunity. This prediction should not be confused withself-affirmation hypotheses derived from dissonancetheory[15]. First, unlike dissonance theory, the SVPMpredicts a mere contemplation effect: it is not necessaryto commit a counter-normative act: it is sufficient forcounter-normative thoughts to flicker briefly throughconsciousness before rejecting them. That pre-rejectioninterval, during which one’s natural first reaction topropositions is to consent[16], can produce a subjectivesense – however unjustified – that one has beencontaminated[17,18]. Second, the SVPM predicts thatthe longer one contemplates taboo-breaching proposals,the more contaminated one should feel.

Reality-constraint hypotheses

TheSVPMportrayspeopleasengagedinadelicatementalbalancing act. The model posits that people are largelysincere in their protestations that certain values aresacred.Butthemodelrecognizesthatpeopleregularlyruninto decision problems in which the costs of upholdingsacred values become prohibitive. If parents dedicatedtheir net worth to their children’s safety, they wouldimpoverish themselves. Likewise, a society committed toguaranteeing state-of-the-art health care for all citizenswouldsoon devoteitsentireGDPtotheproject.Themodelpredictsthat,withoutpressuretoconfrontsecular–sacredcontradictions, people will be motivated to look away andbe easily distracted by rhetorical smokescreens. However,when gaze-aversion is not an option, people will welcomerhetorical redeﬁnitions of situations that transform tabootrade-offs into more acceptable routine trade-offs (onesecularvalueagainstanother,thesortofmentaloperationone performs every time one strolls into a supermarket) ortragictrade-offs(onesacredvalueagainstanother,suchashonor versus life, the stuff of classical Greek tragedies).

Empirical research

Portraying people as reliable defenders of sacred values

Tests of the SVPM presuppose culture-speciﬁc knowledgeof what people hold sacred. What counts as a taboo trade-off hinges, for example, on contending ideological world- views. Thus, although Tetlock, Peterson and Lerner[7]found considerable agreement among liberal Democratsand conservative Republicans on the boundaries of thefungible (widely agreed-on taboo trade-offs includedbuying and selling body organs, adoption rights forchildren, and basic rights and responsibilities of citizen-ship), they found considerable disagreement on theideological fringes. For example, there was a sharpcontrast between libertarians who wanted to extendmarket-pricing norms into taboo territory and socialistswho wanted to retract market-pricing norms from cur-rently permissible domains such as medical care, legalcounsel and housing (seeBox 1).Tetlock

et al

.[9]documented the importance of ideological sub-cultures in identifying two other forms of proscribed social cognition:(1) Forbidden base rates are predictively potentgeneralizations about groups of human beings that aBayesian statistician would not hesitate to insert intolikelihood computations but that some observers fearcould be used as justiﬁcations for racial or sexualdiscrimination. Decision-makers who use statistical gen-eralizations about crime, academic achievement, and soforth, to justify disadvantaging already disadvantagedpopulations are less likely to be lauded for their statisticalsavvy than they are to be condemned for their moralinsensitivity[21,22];(2) Heretical counterfactuals are ‘what-if’ assertionsabout historical causality (framed as subjective condi-tionals with false antecedents) that pass conventionaltests of plausibility but that undercut religious or politicalontologies. Hierarchical cultures are prone to treatcounterfactuals as heretical if they reduce the conduct of higher-spiritual-status beings (messiahs, saints, foundingleaders, etc.) to explanatory schemas that are routinelyapplied to lower-spiritual-status beings[23].In one study of forbidden base rates, Tetlock

et al

.[9]manipulated observers’ beliefs about the correlationbetween the distribution of ﬁres across neighborhoods and

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racial composition of neighborhoods. Liberal-egalitarianobservers responded with outrage at executives who usedtherace-correlatedbaseratesinsettingpremiumsbutnotatexecutives who used race-neutral base rates. In a follow-upexperiment, participants role-played executives who hadbeen lured into inadvertently using a forbidden base rate.Thrust into this predicament, egalitarians were morelikely to cleanse themselves morally by volunteering forgood causes, especially anti-racist ones.In a study of heretical counterfactuals, Tetlock

et al

.[9]tested the prediction that moral communities erectemotionally charged boundaries against counterfactualspeculation that applies secular or scientific standards of evidence to the founders of sacred movements. Christianfundamentalists were outraged by heretical counterfac-tuals that implied that the life of Jesus was as subject tothe vagaries of chance as the lives of ordinary mortals andthat, for example, if Jesus had been brought up in a singleparent household (as a result of a suspicious Josephabandoning a pregnant Mary), Jesus would have grownup to be a less confident and charismatic personality.Fundamentalists also felt contaminated by such counter-factual logic and cleansed by renewing their commitmentstoservingtheirchurch.Fundamentalists,however,reactedwith equanimity when the same cause–effect schema(linking infidelity to single-parenthood to adverse effectson children) was applied to the lives of regular people.

Tragic trade-offs

Thus far, the discussion has focused on the distinctionbetween taboo trade-offs (which pit sacred values againstsecular ones) and routine trade-offs (which pit secular values against each other) and has ignored tragic trade-offs (which pit sacred values against each other). This lastdistinctionis,however,worthexaminingbecauseevidencesuggests that the ‘mere-contemplation’ effect takes oppo-site functional forms for taboo and tragic trade-offs. In oneexperiment, Tetlock

et al

.[9]asked people to judge ahospital administrator who had to chose either betweensavingthelifeofoneboyoranotherboy(atragictrade-off),or between saving the life of a boy and saving the hospital$1 million (a taboo trade-off). This experiment manipu-lated: (a) whether the administrator found the decisioneasyandmadeitquickly,orfoundthedecisiondifﬁcultandtook a long time; (b) which option the administrator chose.In the taboo trade-off condition, people were most positivetowards the administrator who quickly chose to saveJohnny whereas they were most punitive towards theadministrator who found the decision difﬁcult andeventually chose the hospital. In the tragic trade-off condition, people were more positive towards the admin-istrator who made the decision slowly rather than quickly,regardless of which boy he chose to save. Thus, lingeringover a taboo trade-off, even if one ultimately does the rightthing, makes one a target of moral outrage. But lingeringover a tragic trade-off serves to emphasize the gravity of the issues at stake.Taboo trade-offs are also contaminating. To observe ataboo trade-off without condemning it is to becomecomplicit in thetransgression. The hospital-administratorstudy revealed the highest level of moral cleansing(willingness to support organ-donation campaigns) whenpeople thought the decision-maker had not only made thewrong choice in the taboo-trade-off condition but made itafter thinking about it for a long time.

Portraying people as neither vigilant nor resolute defenders of the sacred

Vexing questions remain concerning the disjunctionbetween what people say about sacred values and thecompromises that they make in the real world of scarceresources. Ultimately, someone must set priorities, aprocess that, however distasteful, requires attaching atleast implicit monetary values to sacred values. If politicalelites are to avoid incurring the righteous wrath of themasses, some combination of three things must be true:(1) sacred values are merely pseudo-sacred and ordinarycitizens are prepared – when elites present good argu-ments or tempting inducements – to abandon the illusionthat certain values are infinitely important; (2) elitesare skilled at reframing taboo trade-offs so that theytake (more politically palatable) tragic or routine forms;(3) elites do not need to be all that rhetorically giftedbecause people are willing to look the other way aslong as taboo trade-offs are not flagrantly paradedbefore them[24].There is mounting evidence for all three propositions.Tetlock[25]found that, although most people wereinitially appalled by the idea of buying and selling of body organs for medical transplants, 40% qualified theiropposition when convinced that: (a) such transactions arethe only way to save lives that otherwise would have beenlost; (b) steps have been taken to assist the poor inpurchasing organs and to prevent the poor from selling

Box 1. The personal value of objects

Evenlittlethingscantakeonsacredsignificance.Inacompellingseriesof experiments, Kahneman and colleagues demonstrated that peopledemand more to giveup an object, such asa mug or pen theyhavejustbeen given, than they would be willing to spend to acquire the object.Kahneman and Tversky [19]attributed this ‘endowment effect’ to akinkin the value function of prospect theory: the disutility of losingsomething is greater than the utility of gaining it.Many economists find the effect puzzling. In an idealized worldregulated by neo-classical principles, buyers and sellers are supposedto be interchangeable and the endowment effect qualifies as anuisance that slows the rate at which markets clear. But in themessy real world, people infuse objects with meanings that reflecttheir relationship histories. In a set of experiments, McGraw,Tetlock and Kristel [20] manipulated how people acquired objects.They found that whereas the customary size of endowment effectsin laboratory settings is a 2:1 ratio between willingness-to-acceptand willingness-to-pay prices, the ratio soared to 8:1 for objectsreceived via communal-sharing or family rituals. They alsodocumented a surge in confusion and outrage – as well as inrefusals even to consider assigning dollar values – when peoplewere asked to sell objects acquired in intimate relationships. Someobjects apparently became infinitely valuable.

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