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7 July 2003
Many people insist that their commitments to certain environments (what price endangered species?), and civil
values (e.g. love, honor, justice) are absolute and inviol- liberties and rights (can ethnic– religious profiling to
able – in effect, sacred. They treat the mere thought of identify terrorists be justified on Bayesian and cost –
trading off sacred values against secular ones (such as benefit grounds?). This article explores these issues in two
money) as transparently outrageous – in effect, taboo. sections. The first section offers a working definition of
Economists insist, however, that in a world of scarce sacred values and a set of hypotheses concerning how
resources, taboo trade-offs are unavoidable. Research people cope with secular encroachments on such values.
shows that, although people do respond with moral The second section sketches the principal lines of empirical
outrage to taboo trade-offs, they often acquiesce when work bearing on these hypotheses.
secular violations of sacred values are rhetorically
reframed as routine or tragic trade-offs. The results Conceptual backdrop
reveal the peculiar character of moral boundaries on Political philosophers – from Aristotle to Marx and
what is thinkable, alternately punitively rigid and Nietzsche – have long speculated that citizens are more
forgivingly flexible. likely to do what they are supposed to do if they believe the
moral codes that regulate their lives are not arbitrary
This article summarizes an emerging body of research that social constructions but rather are anchored in bedrock
explores how people cope – cognitively and emotionally – values that transcend the whims of mere mortals. ‘Don’t do
with a fundamental contradiction of social life. The x because I say so’ has less impact than ‘don’t do x because
contradiction can take diverse forms but its canonical God says so’. By the middle of the 20th century, prominent
form can be stated simply. On the one hand, as economists anthropologists and sociologists had made the complemen-
frequently remind us, we live in a world of scarce resources tary observation that, although there is vast variation in
in which, like it or not, everything must ultimately take on what groups hold sacred, sacredness seems to qualify as a
an implicit or explicit price [1]. Indeed, this austere insight functional universal across societies, both primitive and
prompted Oscar Wilde to define an economist as someone modern, and that moral communities erect a variety of
who knows the price of everything and the value of psychological and institutional barriers to insulate sacred
nothing. On the other hand, sociological observers point values from secular contamination [5,6].
out that people often insist with apparently great convic- To jumpstart social-cognitive research on this topic,
tion that certain commitments and relationships are Tetlock et al. [7] defined sacred values as those values that
sacred and that even to contemplate trade-offs with the a moral community treats as possessing transcendental
secular values of money or convenience is anathema [2]. In significance that precludes comparisons, trade-offs, or
the social world inhabited by most readers of this journal, indeed any mingling with secular values. Of course, the
to be caught calculating the opportunity costs of one’s policy a community proclaims towards a sacred value
family or professional integrity or loyalty to one’s country represents an expressed, not a revealed, preference. Our
is to reveal that one ‘just does not get it’ – that one simply actual choices may belie our high-sounding proclamations
does not understand what it means to participate in these that we have assigned infinite weight to the sacred value [8].
rule-governed forms of social life in the roles of parent/ Tetlock et al. [9] advanced a sacred value protection
spouse, scientist or citizen. model (SVPM) that asserted that, when sacred values
When economic necessity collides with cultural-identity come under secular assault, people struggle to protect
and moral-religious imperatives, and in the modern world their private selves and public identities from moral
such collisions are common [3,4], the resulting dissonance contamination by the impure thoughts and deeds implied
can be excruciating. Finite resources sometimes require in the taboo proposals. The SVPM can be captured in three
placing at least implicit dollar valuations on a host of interrelated sets of propositions: moral-outrage hypoth-
things that society at large, or vocal ideological sub- eses, moral-cleansing hypotheses, and reality-constraint
cultures, adamantly declare non-fungible: human life hypotheses.
(what price access to medical care?), justice (what price
access to legal representation?), preserving natural Moral outrage
Building on Durkheim’s [2] observations of how people
Corresponding author: Philip E. Tetlock (tetlock@haas.berkeley.edu). respond to affronts to the collective conscience as well as
http://tics.trends.com 1364-6613/03/$ - see front matter q 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00135-9
Review TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.7 No.7 July 2003 321
recent work on factors that inflate punitive damage into decision problems in which the costs of upholding
awards [10 – 12], the SVPM model posits that when people sacred values become prohibitive. If parents dedicated
discover that members of their community have compro- their net worth to their children’s safety, they would
mised sacred values, they experience an aversive arousal impoverish themselves. Likewise, a society committed to
state – moral outrage – that has cognitive, affective and guaranteeing state-of-the-art health care for all citizens
behavioral components: harsh trait attributions to norm would soon devote its entire GDP to the project. The model
violators, anger and contempt, and enthusiastic support predicts that, without pressure to confront secular–sacred
for norm and meta-norm enforcement (punishing both contradictions, people will be motivated to look away and
violators and those who shirk their fair share of the be easily distracted by rhetorical smokescreens. However,
burdensome task of punishing violators for the public good). when gaze-aversion is not an option, people will welcome
The model also predicts derogation as a function of mere rhetorical redefinitions of situations that transform taboo
contemplation. Traditional cognitive accounts trace the trade-offs into more acceptable routine trade-offs (one
difficulty people have been making trade-offs between secular value against another, the sort of mental operation
secular values such as money and convenience and sacred one performs every time one strolls into a supermarket) or
values, such as love and loyalty, to the incommensurability tragic trade-offs (one sacred value against another, such as
problem – the absence of a common metric for comparing honor versus life, the stuff of classical Greek tragedies).
secular and sacred values [13]. The SVPM insists,
however, that people find such trade-offs not only Empirical research
cognitively confusing but morally disturbing and traces Portraying people as reliable defenders of sacred values
this reaction to a deeper or constitutive form of incom- Tests of the SVPM presuppose culture-specific knowledge
mensurability. Our commitments to other people require of what people hold sacred. What counts as a taboo trade-
us to deny that certain things are comparable. Even to off hinges, for example, on contending ideological world-
contemplate attaching a finite monetary value to one’s views. Thus, although Tetlock, Peterson and Lerner [7]
friendships, children, or loyalty to one’s country is to found considerable agreement among liberal Democrats
disqualify oneself from membership in the associated and conservative Republicans on the boundaries of the
moral community. Constitutive incommensurability arises fungible (widely agreed-on taboo trade-offs included
whenever values are treated as commensurable subverts buying and selling body organs, adoption rights for
one of the values in the trade-off calculus [14]. Taboo children, and basic rights and responsibilities of citizen-
trade-offs are, in this sense, morally corrosive. The longer ship), they found considerable disagreement on the
observers believe that a decision-maker has contemplated ideological fringes. For example, there was a sharp
an indecent proposal, the harsher their assessments of contrast between libertarians who wanted to extend
that person’s character, even if that person ultimately market-pricing norms into taboo territory and socialists
makes the ‘right’ choice and affirms the sacred value. who wanted to retract market-pricing norms from cur-
rently permissible domains such as medical care, legal
Moral cleansing counsel and housing (see Box 1).
Resource constraints can bring people into disturbingly Tetlock et al. [9] documented the importance of
close psychological contact with temptations to compro- ideological sub-cultures in identifying two other forms of
mise sacred values. The SVPM predicts that decision- proscribed social cognition:
makers will feel tainted by merely contemplating (1) Forbidden base rates are predictively potent
scenarios that breach the psychological wall between generalizations about groups of human beings that a
secular and sacred and engage in symbolic acts of moral Bayesian statistician would not hesitate to insert into
cleansing that reaffirm their solidarity with the moral likelihood computations but that some observers fear
community. This prediction should not be confused with could be used as justifications for racial or sexual
self-affirmation hypotheses derived from dissonance discrimination. Decision-makers who use statistical gen-
theory [15]. First, unlike dissonance theory, the SVPM eralizations about crime, academic achievement, and so
predicts a mere contemplation effect: it is not necessary forth, to justify disadvantaging already disadvantaged
to commit a counter-normative act: it is sufficient for populations are less likely to be lauded for their statistical
counter-normative thoughts to flicker briefly through savvy than they are to be condemned for their moral
consciousness before rejecting them. That pre-rejection insensitivity [21,22];
interval, during which one’s natural first reaction to (2) Heretical counterfactuals are ‘what-if’ assertions
propositions is to consent [16], can produce a subjective about historical causality (framed as subjective condi-
sense – however unjustified – that one has been tionals with false antecedents) that pass conventional
contaminated [17,18]. Second, the SVPM predicts that tests of plausibility but that undercut religious or political
the longer one contemplates taboo-breaching proposals, ontologies. Hierarchical cultures are prone to treat
the more contaminated one should feel. counterfactuals as heretical if they reduce the conduct of
higher-spiritual-status beings (messiahs, saints, founding
Reality-constraint hypotheses leaders, etc.) to explanatory schemas that are routinely
The SVPM portrays people as engaged in a delicate mental applied to lower-spiritual-status beings [23].
balancing act. The model posits that people are largely In one study of forbidden base rates, Tetlock et al. [9]
sincere in their protestations that certain values are manipulated observers’ beliefs about the correlation
sacred. But the model recognizes that people regularly run between the distribution of fires across neighborhoods and
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322 Review TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.7 No.7 July 2003
racial composition of neighborhoods. Liberal-egalitarian Johnny whereas they were most punitive towards the
observers responded with outrage at executives who used administrator who found the decision difficult and
the race-correlated base rates in setting premiums but not at eventually chose the hospital. In the tragic trade-off
executives who used race-neutral base rates. In a follow-up condition, people were more positive towards the admin-
experiment, participants role-played executives who had istrator who made the decision slowly rather than quickly,
been lured into inadvertently using a forbidden base rate. regardless of which boy he chose to save. Thus, lingering
Thrust into this predicament, egalitarians were more over a taboo trade-off, even if one ultimately does the right
likely to cleanse themselves morally by volunteering for thing, makes one a target of moral outrage. But lingering
good causes, especially anti-racist ones. over a tragic trade-off serves to emphasize the gravity of
In a study of heretical counterfactuals, Tetlock et al. [9] the issues at stake.
tested the prediction that moral communities erect Taboo trade-offs are also contaminating. To observe a
emotionally charged boundaries against counterfactual taboo trade-off without condemning it is to become
speculation that applies secular or scientific standards of complicit in the transgression. The hospital-administrator
evidence to the founders of sacred movements. Christian study revealed the highest level of moral cleansing
fundamentalists were outraged by heretical counterfac- (willingness to support organ-donation campaigns) when
tuals that implied that the life of Jesus was as subject to people thought the decision-maker had not only made the
the vagaries of chance as the lives of ordinary mortals and wrong choice in the taboo-trade-off condition but made it
that, for example, if Jesus had been brought up in a single after thinking about it for a long time.
parent household (as a result of a suspicious Joseph
abandoning a pregnant Mary), Jesus would have grown Portraying people as neither vigilant nor resolute
up to be a less confident and charismatic personality. defenders of the sacred
Fundamentalists also felt contaminated by such counter- Vexing questions remain concerning the disjunction
factual logic and cleansed by renewing their commitments between what people say about sacred values and the
to serving their church. Fundamentalists, however, reacted compromises that they make in the real world of scarce
with equanimity when the same cause–effect schema resources. Ultimately, someone must set priorities, a
(linking infidelity to single-parenthood to adverse effects process that, however distasteful, requires attaching at
on children) was applied to the lives of regular people. least implicit monetary values to sacred values. If political
elites are to avoid incurring the righteous wrath of the
Tragic trade-offs masses, some combination of three things must be true:
Thus far, the discussion has focused on the distinction (1) sacred values are merely pseudo-sacred and ordinary
between taboo trade-offs (which pit sacred values against citizens are prepared – when elites present good argu-
secular ones) and routine trade-offs (which pit secular ments or tempting inducements – to abandon the illusion
values against each other) and has ignored tragic trade- that certain values are infinitely important; (2) elites
offs (which pit sacred values against each other). This last are skilled at reframing taboo trade-offs so that they
distinction is, however, worth examining because evidence take (more politically palatable) tragic or routine forms;
suggests that the ‘mere-contemplation’ effect takes oppo- (3) elites do not need to be all that rhetorically gifted
site functional forms for taboo and tragic trade-offs. In one because people are willing to look the other way as
experiment, Tetlock et al. [9] asked people to judge a long as taboo trade-offs are not flagrantly paraded
hospital administrator who had to chose either between before them [24].
saving the life of one boy or another boy (a tragic trade-off), There is mounting evidence for all three propositions.
or between saving the life of a boy and saving the hospital Tetlock [25] found that, although most people were
$1 million (a taboo trade-off). This experiment manipu- initially appalled by the idea of buying and selling of
lated: (a) whether the administrator found the decision body organs for medical transplants, 40% qualified their
easy and made it quickly, or found the decision difficult and opposition when convinced that: (a) such transactions are
took a long time; (b) which option the administrator chose. the only way to save lives that otherwise would have been
In the taboo trade-off condition, people were most positive lost; (b) steps have been taken to assist the poor in
towards the administrator who quickly chose to save purchasing organs and to prevent the poor from selling
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