From Philip Tetlock (2003) paper on Taboo Cognition: Thinking the unthinkable: sacred values and taboo cognitions.
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 as money) as transparently outrageous – in effect, taboo. Economists insist, however, that in a world of scarce resources, taboo trade-offs are unavoidable. Researchs hows that, although people do respond with moraloutrage to taboo trade-offs, they often acquiesce whensecular violations of sacred values are rhetorically reframed as routine or tragic trade-offs. The results reveal the peculiar character of moral boundaries onwhat is thinkable, alternately punitively rigid and forgivingly flexible.
This article summarizes an emerging body of research that explores how people cope – cognitively and emotionally –with a fundamental contradiction of social life. The contradiction can take diverse forms but its canonicalform can be stated simply.
On the one hand, as economistsfrequently remind us, we live in a world of scarce resources in which, like it or not, everything must ultimately take onan implicit or explicit price. Indeed, this austere insight prompted Oscar Wilde to define an economist as someonewho knows the price of everything and the value ofnothing.
On the other hand, sociological observers pointout that people often insist with apparently great conviction that certain commitments and relationships aresacred and that even to contemplate trade-offs with the secular values of money or convenience is anathema. In the social world inhabited by most readers of this journal, to be caught calculating the opportunity costs of one’s family or professional integrity or loyalty to one’s country is to reveal that one ‘just does not get it’ – that one simply does not understand what it means to participate in these rule-governed forms of social life in the roles of parent/spouse, scientist or citizen.
When economic necessity collides with cultural-identityand moral-religious imperatives, and in the modern world such collisions are common, the resulting dissonance can be excruciating.
Finite resources sometimes require placing 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 price access to legal representation?), preserving natural environments (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 two sections. The first section offers a working definition ofsacred values and a set of hypotheses concerning howpeople cope with secular encroachments on such values. The second section sketches the principal lines of empiricalwork bearing on these hypotheses.
Conceptual backdrop
Political philosophers – from Aristotle to Marx and Nietzsche – have long speculated that citizens are morelikely to do what they are supposed to do if they believe themoral codes that regulate their lives are not arbitrarysocial constructions but rather are anchored in bedrock values that transcend the whims of mere mortals. ‘Don’t do x because I say so’ has less impact than ‘don’t do x because God says so’. By the middle of the 20th century, prominent anthropologists and sociologists had made the complementary observation that, although there is vast variation inwhat groups hold sacred, sacredness seems to qualify as afunctional universal across societies, both primitive and modern, and that moral communities erect a variety of psychological and institutional barriers to insulate sacredvalues from secular contamination.To jumpstart social-cognitive research on this topic,T etlocket al. defined sacred values as those values that a moral community treats as possessing transcendental significance that precludes comparisons, trade-offs, orindeed any mingling with secular values. Of course, the policy a community proclaims towards a sacred valuerepresents an expressed, not a revealed, preference. Our actual choices may belie our high-sounding proclamations that we have assigned infinite weight to the sacred value.
Tetlock et al. 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 moral contamination by the impure thoughts and deeds impliedin the taboo proposals. The SVPM can be captured in three interrelated sets of propositions: moral-outrage hypotheses, moral-cleansing hypotheses, and reality-constraint hypotheses.
… to conclude:
…Intuitive theologians are suspicious, and unapologetically so, of the classic Enlightenment values of open-minded inquiry and free markets. Opportunity costs be damned, some trade-offs should never be proposed, some statistical truths never used, and some lines of causal/counterfactual inquiry never pursued.
More available here and Tetlock’s site here.
A blog on his Superforecasting ideas here and putting the ideas into practise on judging success of biopharma drugs here.
