Thinking the unthinkable¶
Tetlock, P. E. (2003). Thinking the unthinkable: Sacred values and taboo cognitions. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(7), 320-324.
Cited by¶
3 citations across 3 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Sacred
- What makes the category distinctive is not the intensity of valuation but its Kind (Type Theory): the sacred is removed from the ledger of comparison altogether, so that proposals to price it, swap it, or measure it against ordinary goods register not as bad bargains but as category-errors.
This sourceExperimental moral psychology of sacred values: people treat them as removed from comparison so that pricing them registers as a category-error, react to proposed trade-offs against secular goods with moral outrage and "moral cleansing," and the same set-apart structure recurs in secular as well as religious settings; identifying a sacred value forecasts this resistance and the rituals of insulation and cleansing that surround it.
- What makes the category distinctive is not the intensity of valuation but its Kind (Type Theory): the sacred is removed from the ledger of comparison altogether, so that proposals to price it, swap it, or measure it against ordinary goods register not as bad bargains but as category-errors.
- Taboo
- If you treat a taboo as an empirical disagreement to be rationally resolved — offering cost-benefit analysis, appealing to consequences — you will deepen the offense because you are proposing to discuss something that should be unthinkable
This sourceExperimental moral psychology of sacred values: people treat them as removed from comparison so that pricing them registers as a category-error, react to proposed trade-offs against secular goods with moral outrage and "moral cleansing," and the same set-apart structure recurs in secular as well as religious settings; identifying a sacred value forecasts this resistance and the rituals of insulation and cleansing that surround it.
- If you treat a taboo as an empirical disagreement to be rationally resolved — offering cost-benefit analysis, appealing to consequences — you will deepen the offense because you are proposing to discuss something that should be unthinkable
- Value Commensuration
- Commensuration resolves paralysis by imposing a common metric, binding diverse stakeholders into a single decision framework, though Tetlock (2003) shows experimentally that when sacred or protected values are forced into monetary trade-offs, decision-makers exhibit moral outrage and refusal because the act of commensuration itself violates the value's protected status.
This sourceExperimental moral psychology of sacred values: people treat them as removed from comparison so that pricing them registers as a category-error, react to proposed trade-offs against secular goods with moral outrage and "moral cleansing," and the same set-apart structure recurs in secular as well as religious settings; identifying a sacred value forecasts this resistance and the rituals of insulation and cleansing that surround it.
- Commensuration resolves paralysis by imposing a common metric, binding diverse stakeholders into a single decision framework, though Tetlock (2003) shows experimentally that when sacred or protected values are forced into monetary trade-offs, decision-makers exhibit moral outrage and refusal because the act of commensuration itself violates the value's protected status.
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