The psychology of the unthinkable: taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical counterfactuals

Five studies explored cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses to proscribed forms of social cognition. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that people responded to taboo trade-offs that monetized sacred values with moral outrage and cleansing. Experiments 3 and 4 revealed that racial egalitarians were least likely to use, and angriest at those who did use, race-tainted base rates and that egalitarians who inadvertently used such base rates tried to reaffirm their fair-mindedness. Experiment 5 revealed that Christian fundamentalists were most likely to reject heretical counterfactuals that applied everyday causal schemata to Biblical narratives and to engage in moral cleansing after merely contemplating such possibilities. Although the results fit the sacred-value-protection model (SVPM) better than rival formulations, the SVPM must draw on cross-cultural taxonomies of relational schemata to specify normative boundaries on thought.     

Taboo Trade-offs: Reactions to Transactions That Transgress the Spheres of Justice

Taboo trade-offs violate deeply held normative intuitions about the integrity, even sanctity, of certain relationships and the moral-political values underlying those relationships. For instance, if asked to estimate the monetary worth of one's children, of one's loyalty to one's country, or of acts of friendship, people find the questions more than merely confusing or cognitively intractable: they find such questions themselves morally offensive. This article draws on Fiske's relational theory and Tetlock's value pluralism model: (a) to identify the conditions under which people are likely to treat trade-offs as taboo; (b) to describe how people collectively deal with trade-offs that become problematic; (c) to specify the conceptual components of moral outrage and the factors that affect the intensity of reactions to various explicit trade-offs; (d) to explore the various strategies that decision-makers—required by resource scarcity and institutional roles to confront taboo trade-offs—use to deflect the wrath of censorious observers; (e) to offer a method of dispute resolution based on pluralism.     

Are morally motivated decision makers insensitive to the consequences of their choices?

Is morally motivated decision making different from other kinds of decision making? There is evidence that when people have sacred or protected values (PVs), they reject trade-offs for secular values (e.g., "You can't put a price on a human life") and tend to employ deontological rather than consequentialist decision principles. People motivated by PVs appear to show quantity insensitivity. That is, in trade-off situations, they are less sensitive to the consequences of their choices than are people without PVs. The current study examined the relation between PVs and quantity insensitivity using two methods of preference assessment: In one design, previous results were replicated; in a second, PVs were related to increased quantity sensitivity. These and other findings call into question important presumed properties of PVs, suggesting that how PVs affect willingness to make trade-offs depends on where attention is focused, a factor that varies substantially across contexts.     

Fundamentalism

We should never assume that moral outrage provoked by the violation of traditional religious values is a mere reflection of secular grievances of some kind, but we should recognize that such outrage is often meshed with nationalistic and social grievances. If we take the religious Zionist militancy of some Israeli settlers (who do not see themselves as settlers), their political activities have focussed primarily on settling, and opposing the withdrawal from, the territories that Israel occupied in 1967 rather than on moral issues like abortion, homosexuality and pornography. Militant Islamic movements often stress their opposition to Western domination as much moral issues concerning personal conduct. The Shas movement in Israel is fueled in part by the resentment of Israeli Jews of Middle Eastern origin (the Mizrahim or Sephardim) towards Jews of European origin. All these movements can be said to have a ‘fundamentalist’ dimension insofar as they insist on strict conformity to sacred texts and on a moral code based on them, but focus exclusively or even primarily on this dimension of these movements is to ignore some of the crucial sources of their political appeal. With respect to the much discussed issue of bias in the comparative study of ‘fundamentalism’, it is important to avoid idealization as well as demonization. While it is important to correct popular stereotypes about religious conservatives, it is also important not to gloss over the very real problems associated with movements that demand that civil law be based on sacred law.     

Fundamentalism

We should never assume that moral outrage provoked by the violation of traditional religious values is a mere reflection of secular grievances of some kind, but we should recognize that such outrage is often meshed with nationalistic and social grievances. If we take the religious Zionist militancy of some Israeli settlers (who do not see themselves as settlers), their political activities have focussed primarily on settling, and opposing the withdrawal from, the territories that Israel occupied in 1967 rather than on moral issues like abortion, homosexuality and pornography. Militant Islamic movements often stress their opposition to Western domination as much moral issues concerning personal conduct. The Shas movement in Israel is fueled in part by the resentment of Israeli Jews of Middle Eastern origin (the Mizrahim or Sephardim) towards Jews of European origin. All these movements can be said to have a ‘fundamentalist’ dimension insofar as they insist on strict conformity to sacred texts and on a moral code based on them, but focus exclusively or even primarily on this dimension of these movements is to ignore some of the crucial sources of their political appeal. With respect to the much discussed issue of bias in the comparative study of ‘fundamentalism’, it is important to avoid idealization as well as demonization. While it is important to correct popular stereotypes about religious conservatives, it is also important not to gloss over the very real problems associated with movements that demand that civil law be based on sacred law.     

In the name of honour and freedom: the sacred as a justifying tool for ISIS’ and secular violence

In this paper, I challenge the misconception that ISIS justifies violence in an ontologically Islamic manner. I argue that ISIS and Western secular governments justify violence against each other through the same logic, by resorting to the notion of the sacred. The sacred is a historical and contextually contingent structure of meaning manifested through bipartite sets of cultural forms, informing social practices based on moral and emotional identifications. ISIS appropriates the Islamic sacred forms of Caliphate (legitimate governing authority) and ummah (collective Islamic identity), and projects the latter as humiliated by Western hegemony; ISIS calls upon Muslims to engage in violence in order to gain honour and recognition. In Western secular states the public sphere is a sacred space and popular sovereignty is the secular collective identity; they justify violence against ISIS as the defence of freedom from ISIS’ alleged barbarity and uncivility.     

Taboo Trade‐Offs,Relational Framing,and the Acceptability of Exchanges

This article reports 4 experiments demonstrating the power of social‐relational framing to complicate superficially straightforward economic exchanges of goods and services. Drawing from Alan Fiske's theoretical framework as well as Tetlock's sacred value protection model, the experiments demonstrate (a) pricing distortions and refusals to answer certain questions when people contemplate buying or selling objects endowed with special relational significance; (b) moral outrage and cognitive confusion when people are asked whether they would allow market‐pricing norms to influence decisions that fall under the normative purview of communal‐sharing, authority‐ranking, and equality‐matching relationships; and (c) elements of tactical flexibility in how people respond to breaches of relational boundaries (a willingness to turn a blind eye to taboo trade‐offs when it is in their interest to do so). An agenda for future work is offered that explores how pragmatic, economic interests are balanced against the desire to be (or appear to be) the type of person who honors social–relational constraints on what should be considered fungible.     

An introduction to the phenomenology of religion

This article examines how a secular lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) community choir in New Zealand negotiates a relationship with sacred repertoire, and the church in which the choir is located. A mixed-methods study included semi-structured interviews with 26 current and past members, musical directors and a church representative. Themes that emerged included tensions between religion and an LGBTQ cultural secularism, intersections of reconciliation and affirmation and the identity constitutive uses of space. Findings suggest that although, as LGBTQ-identified people, secularism is an important identity, sacred music is pleasurable. The choir provides church-like functions, through a sense of community, ritual and an environment for spiritual reflection and the practice of values. The church location offers reconciliation for those with Christian backgrounds. Benefitting each other, the choir gives St. Andrew’s legitimacy in its identity as an LGBTQ-inclusive church, and the church space has a queering effect on the presentation of the choir.     

Islam as moral education: madrasa courses and contestation of the secular in the Republic of Tatarstan,Russia

In this paper, based on fieldwork in a small town in post-Soviet Tatarstan, Russia, I explore the dynamics of religious life in a rural community, highlighting the ways religious and secular education interact with and reinforce each other, contributing to the processes of religious revival in this community. Soviet ideas and practices of moral education as well as post-Soviet concerns about morality constitute the common ground that brings secular and religious together. Adhering to the Soviet idea that society is responsible for the moral education of its young people, local schoolteachers use Islam as a source of moral values and disciplining practices to bring up the younger generation, affected by post-Soviet transformations. Teachers increasingly rely on Islamic ethics in the moral upbringing of schoolchildren that effectively challenges the separation between secular and religious education. Religion acquires growing significance as a process of moral edification and discipline.     

To Act or Not to Act: Nonconsequentialism in Environmental Decision-Making

Research on environmental-decision making is usually based on utilitarian models, which imply that people's decisions are only influenced by the outcomes. This research provides evidence for values and moral positions that reflect nonconsequentialist rather than consequentialist views. In doing this, this article refers to “sacred values,” which are values that are seen as not-substitutable and nontradable. Two studies were designed to examine evidence for sacred values and their role on act versus omission choices within the environmental domain. The studies revealed that sacred values were closely associated with preferences for actions, trade-off reluctance, deontological focus, and position of moral universalism. The results suggest that it is important to account for sacred values and nonconsequentialist views in environmental decision-making research.     

Insulting the sacred in a multicultural society: the conviction of Jussi Halla-aho under the Finnish religious insult section

This article analyses the most well-known and legally important contemporary Finnish religious insult case: the case of the politician Jussi Halla-aho. Concluded in 2012, the said legal process resulted in a conviction due to Halla-aho’s blog post about Islam and its sacred figures. Using a discursive framing, the article argues that the contemporary religious insult cases can, in fact, be political struggles involving various interests in a multicultural society. Building on broadly Durkheimian theorisation of the sacred, it also argues, that besides the Islamic objects set apart as sacred in the process, ‘secular’ ideals or values, such as the public order, tolerance, equality, and freedom of religion are also constructed as such and protected by the officials. By protecting Islam, the courts, in fact, aimed to protect a ‘secular sacred order’ against societal threats.     

Social functionalist frameworks for judgment and choice: intuitive politicians,theologians, and prosecutors

Research on judgment and choice has been dominated by functionalist assumptions that depict people as either intuitive scientists animated by epistemic goals or intuitive economists animated by utilitarian ones. This article identifies 3 alternative social functionalist starting points for inquiry: people as pragmatic politicians trying to cope with accountability demands from key constituencies in their lives, principled theologians trying to protect sacred values from secular encroachments, and prudent prosecutors trying to enforce social norms. Each functionalist framework stimulates middle-range theories that specify (a) cognitive-affective-behavioral strategies of coping with adaptive challenges and (b) the implications of these coping strategies for identifying empirical and normative boundary conditions on judgmental tendencies classified as errors or biases within the dominant research programs.     

Anger, disgust, and presumption of harm as reactions to taboo-breaking behaviors

Three experiments investigated the relationship between the presumption of harm in harmfree violations of creatural norms (taboos) and the moral emotions of anger and disgust. In Experiment 1, participants made a presumption of harm to others from taboo violations, even in conditions described as harmless and not involving other people; this presumption was predicted by anger and not disgust. Experiment 2 manipulated taboo violation and included a cognitive load task to clarify the post hoc nature of presumption of harm. Experiment 3 was similar but more accurately measured presumed harm. In Experiments 2 and 3, only without load was symbolic harm presumed, indicating its post hoc function to justify moral anger, which was not affected by load. In general, manipulations of harmfulness to others predicted moral anger better than moral disgust, whereas manipulations of taboo predicted disgust better. The presumption of harm was found on measures of symbolic rather than actual harm when a choice existed. These studies clarify understanding of the relationship between emotions and their justification when people consider victimless, offensive acts.     

Sacred texts

It seems indisputable that the way we define and classify texts influences the way we read texts. My concern is to develop methods for reading and understanding texts that are influenced by distinctions between the secular and the sacred, and then draw out some preliminary implications of these methods and distinctions for relationships between church and state in liberal democracies. Distinctions between sacred and secular texts can be tracked with the conjecture that a full textual reading of a sacred text requires a kind of interior commitment. I develop the conjecture, and then argue that this requirement increases the distance between scepticism and religious belief. The upshot of such distinctions and implications is that we cannot read sacred texts as sacred while maintaining the secular consciousness that defines liberal democracies. Acknowledging these textual differences between religion and politics lays to rest, permanently, the popular creed of exceptionalism, the belief that secular patterns of thought, grounded in compromise and toleration, can scan and comprehend religious beliefs from some impartial perspective.     

Cognitive biases in moral judgments that affect political behavior

Cognitive biases that affect decision making may affect the decisions of citizens that influence public policy. To the extent that decisions follow principles other than maximizing utility for all, it is less likely that utility will be maximized, and the citizens will ultimately suffer the results. Here I outline some basic arguments concerning decisions by citizens, using voting as an example. I describe two types of values that may lead to sub-optimal consequences when these values influence political behavior: moralistic values (which people are willing to impose on others regardless of the consequences) and protected values (PVs, values protected from trade-offs). I present evidence against the idea that voting is expressive, i.e., that voters aim to express their moral views rather than to have an effect on outcomes. I show experimentally that PVs are often moralistic. Finally, I present some data that citizens’ think of their duty in a parochial way, neglecting out-groups. I conclude that moral judgments are important determinants of citizen behavior, that these judgments are subject to biases and based on moralistic values, and that, therefore, outcomes are probably less good than they could be.     

Religious and secular roads to justify wrongdoing: How values interact with culture in explaining moral disengagement attitudes

Using a person-culture interaction perspective, we explored how socialization through a secular versus a religiously orthodox educational system in Israel moderated the associations between personal values and moral disengagement attitudes. In Study 1 (N = 333), we found that among orthodox (but not secular) participants, conservation values were negatively and openness-to-change values were positively associated with moral disengagement. Self-transcendence values were negatively associated with moral disengagement in the whole sample. In Study 2 (N = 251), we focused on the dehumanization subscale of disengagement attitudes to examine the impact of values accessibility among secular and orthodox participants. Findings showed that among secular participants, universalism values inhibited dehumanization more than conservation values did. Conversely, among orthodox participants, conservation values inhibited dehumanization more than openness-to-change values.     

Psychology out of the laboratory: the challenge of violent extremism

The idea that people inevitably act in accordance with their self-interest on the basis of a calculation of costs and benefits does not constitute an adequate framework for understanding political acts of violence and self-sacrifice. Recent research suggests that a better understanding is needed of how sacred values and notions of self and group identity lead people to act in terms of principles rather than prospects when the two come into conflict. Perhaps the greatest challenge is to better understand how sacred causes and moral imperatives diffuse through a population and motivate some (usually small) segment of it to commit violent actions. The challenge to psychology is to adopt an interdisciplinary focus drawing on a range of research methods and to become bolder in its choices of study populations if it is to be relevant to real-world problems.     

Relations between emotion,memory, and attention: Evidence from taboo Stroop,lexical decision,and immediate memory tasks

This article reports five experiments demonstrating theoretically coherent effects of emotion on memory and attention. Experiments 1-3 demonstrated three taboo Stroop effects that occur when people name the color of taboo words. One effect is longer color-naming times for taboo than for neutral words, an effect that diminishes with word repetition. The second effect is superior recall of taboo words in surprise memory tests following color naming. The third effect is better recognition memory for colors consistently associated with taboo words rather than with neutral words. None of these effects was due to retrieval factors, attentional disengagement processes, response inhibition, or strategic attention shifts. Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated that taboo words impair immediate recall of the preceding and succeeding words in rapidly presented lists but do not impair lexical decision times. We argue that taboo words trigger specific emotional reactions that facilitate the binding of taboo word meaning to salient contextual aspects, such as occurrence in a task and font color in taboo Stroop tasks.     

The Interplay Between Meaning and Sacred Awareness in Everyday Life: Evidence From a Daily Smartphone Study

People experience meaning in various ways across different secular and sacred situations. However, scholars know relatively little about the situational contexts in which meaning occurs. In this article, we first explored the daily contexts of meaning using data collected by a unique, 2-week experience sampling method through participants’ smartphones. Meaning levels were highest during religious and spiritual practices, as well as during traditional work hours. They were also higher with some activities, such as talking to other people, than other activities, such as playing video games. Second, we examined how feelings of meaningfulness were related to sacred states, parsing out which preceded the other. Sacred states, in which people were aware of God or a higher being, tended to come before feelings of meaning rather than the reverse. From these analyses, meaning emerged as richly patterned in everyday life and closely associated with—and often a consequence of—sacred awareness.     

Multiple moral foundations predict responses to sacrificial dilemmas

Moral dilemmas, by definition, demand trade-offs between competing moral goods (e.g., causing one harm to prevent another). Although moral dilemmas have served as a methodological pillar for moral psychology, surprisingly little research has explored how individual differences in moral values influence responses to dilemmatic trade-offs. In a cross-sectional study (N = 307), we tested competing claims regarding the relationship between the endorsement of foundational moral values and responses to sacrificial dilemmas, in which one judges the moral acceptability of causing fatal harm to one person to save multiple others. Inconsistent with Moral Dyad Theory, our results did not support the prediction that Harm concerns would be the unequivocally most important predictor of sacrifice endorsement. Consistent with Moral Foundations Theory, however, multiple moral values are predictive of sacrifice judgments: Harm and Purity negatively predict, and Ingroup positively predicts, endorsement of harmful action in service of saving lives, with Harm and Purity explaining similar amounts of unique variance. The present study demonstrates the utility of pluralistic accounts of morality, even in moral situations in which harm is central.