From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Aug 10 2003 - 00:28:52 MDT
Rafal wrote
> [See]the article (" Tetlock, P.E., Kristel, O., Elson,
> B.,Green, M., and Lerner, J (final revision process/2000).
> The psychology of the unthinkable: Taboo trade-offs,
> forbidden base rates, and heretical counterfactuals.
> Journal of Personality and Social Psychology")
>
> ### http://www.psy.ohio-state.edu/social/tetlock/rsch2.htm, top of page.
(You have to log in to see the whole paper. Enter
"anonymous" for the userid and "asdf" or anything
for the password.
Here are the first few paragraphs after the abstract. If
this doesn't acidly comment on our recent Robert-centered
discussion, I don't know what does.
The Psychology of the Unthinkable:
Taboo Trade-Offs, Forbidden Base Rates, and Heretical Counterfactuals
Philip E. Tetlock, Orie V. Kristel, S. Beth Elson, Melanie C. Green, and
Jennifer Lerner. The Ohio State University and Carnegie Mellon University
Research on social cognition ultimately rests on functionalist
assumptions about what people are trying to accomplish when they
judge events or make choices. The most influential of these
assumptions have been the intuitive scientist and the intuitive
economist. The former tradition depicts people whose central
objective is to understand underlying patterns of causality, thereby
conferring some advantage in anticipating life-enhancing or
threatening events (cf. Kelley, 1967). The latter tradition depicts
people as decision-makers whose overriding goal is to select
utility-maximizing options from available choice sets (Becker, 1981;
Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). Although theorists often disagree sharply
over how well people live up to the high professional ideals of
science or economics (Mellers, Schwartz, & Cooke, 1998), theorists
agree in placing a normative premium on intellectual flexibility and
agility. Good intuitive scientists and economists look for the most
useful cues in the environment for generating accurate predictions
and making satisfying decisions and quickly abandon hypotheses that
do not "pan out." Rigidity is maladaptive within both frameworks.
This article explores the empirical implications of an
under-explored starting point for inquiry: the notion that, in many
contexts, people are striving to achieve neither epistemic nor
utilitarian goals, but rather--as prominent historical sociologists
have argued (Bell, 1974)--are struggling to protect sacred values
from secular encroachments by increasingly powerful societal trends
toward market capitalism (and the attendant pressure to render
everything fungible) and scientific naturalism (and the attendant
pressure to pursue inquiry wherever it logically leads).
A sacred value can be defined as any value that a moral community
implicitly or explicitly treats as possessing infinite or
transcendental significance that precludes comparisons, trade-offs,
or indeed any other mingling with bounded or secular values. When
sacred values are under assault, the apposite functionalist metaphor
quickly becomes the intuitive moralist/theologian. Sacred values
are often ultimately religious in character but they need not have
divine sanction (hence our hybrid designation of the functionalist
metaphor as moralist/theologian). Sacred values can range from
fundamentalists' faith in God to the liberal/social democratic dogma
of racial equality to the radical libertarian commitment to the
autonomy of the individual. Although the theoretical framework
proposed here does not differentiate sacred values with or without
divine mandate, many writers -- from Samuel Johnson to Fyodor
Dostoyevsky to T.S. Eliot -- have drawn sharp distinctions here, and
have even suggested that only sacred values anchored in faith in God
can sustain genuine moral outrage and cleansing. To paraphrase
Dostoyevsky, if there were no God, no act -- not even cannibalism --
would be forbidden. which depicts people engaged in a continual
struggle to protect their private selves and public identities from
moral contamination by impure thoughts and deeds (Belk et al.,
1989).
The most emphatic ways to distance oneself from normative
transgressions are by: (1) expressing moral outrage---a composite
psychological state that subsumes cognitive reactions (harsh
character attributions to those who endorse the proscribed thoughts
and even to those who do not endorse, but do tolerate, this way of
thinking in others), affective reactions (anger and contempt for
those who endorse the proscribed thoughts), and behavioral reactions
(support for ostracizing and punishing deviant thinkers); (2)
engaging in moral cleansing that reaffirms core values and loyalties
by acting in ways that shore up those aspects of the moral order
that have been undercut by the transgression. Within this
framework, rigidity, accompanied by righteous indignation and by
blanket refusal even to contemplate certain thoughts, can be
commendable -- indeed, it is essential for resolutely reasserting
the identification of self with the collective moral order (cf.
Durkheim, 1925/1976). What looks irrationally obdurate within the
intuitive-scientist and economist research programs can often be
plausibly construed as the principled defense of sacred values
within the moralist/theologian research program (Tetlock, 1999).
This article identifies three types of normative proscriptions--
taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical
counterfactuals--that people consciously or unconsciously impose on
cognitive processes that are fundamental to rationality in the
intuitive scientist and economist traditions. Here we consider each
proscription in turn.
Lee
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