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 state- of-the-art health care to all citizens, it would use all of its GDP.  b (10: :41) b

 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 Sale of organs study  Reframing of taboo trade-offs to seem like tragic or routine trade-offs Sale of organs study  Look the other way when it is not paraded in front of them. Toxic-waste study