What’s bad is easy: Taboo values, affect, and cognition

Some decision situations are so objectionable or repugnant that people refuse to make a choice. This paper seeks to better understand taboo responses, and to distinguish choices that are truly taboo from those that are merely difficult or confusing. Using 22 scenarios that describe potentially taboo issues, Experiment 1 explores reasons for disapproval of the scenarios. We measure a large number of possible reasons for disapproval and a variety of preference responses (including willingness to accept), in order to test for subtleties in taboo responses. We also test cognitive and affective responses to the scenarios. Experiment 2 further explores the interaction, found in Experiment 1, between affective and cognitive factors. Taken as a whole, our results show that people are able to indicate their disapproval consistently across a variety of preference elicitation methods, that their disapproval is better understood as an attitude measure than as an economic valuation (even when the measure is in monetary terms), and that taboo responses are driven primarily by affect.

[1]  E. Peters,et al.  THE FUNCTIONS OF AFFECT IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF PREFERENCES ( 2006 , 2008 .

[2]  M. F. Luce,et al.  Choice processing in emotionally difficult decisions. , 1997, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[3]  Baron,et al.  Protected Values , 1997, Virology.

[4]  Ilana Ritov,et al.  The Construction of Preference: Economic Preferences or Attitude Expressions? An Analysis of Dollar Responses to Public Issues , 2006 .

[5]  Ilana Ritov,et al.  Economic Preferences or Attitude Expressions?: An Analysis of Dollar Responses to Public Issues , 1999 .

[6]  J. Baron,et al.  How serious are expressions of protected values? , 2000, Journal of experimental psychology. Applied.

[7]  D. Read.  Judgment and Choice , 2005 .

[8]  Paul Slovic,et al.  The Springs of Action: Affective and Analytical Information Processing in Choice , 2000 .

[9]  B. Fischhoff,et al.  Value elicitation: Is there anything in there? , 1991 .

[10]  Eric J. Johnson,et al.  The adaptive decision maker , 1993 .

[11]  Ellen Peters,et al.  The Construction of Preference: The Functions of Affect in the Construction of Preferences , 2006 .

[12]  M. F. Luce,et al.  The Rationalizing Effects of Cognitive Load on Emotion-Based Trade-off Avoidance , 2004 .

[13]  G. Calabresi.  Transaction Costs, Resource Allocation and Liability Rules--A Comment , 1968, The Journal of Law and Economics.

[14]  R. Gregory,et al.  Incorporating Value Trade-offs into Community-Based Environmental Risk Decisions , 2002, Environmental Values.

[15]  B. Shiv,et al.  Heart and Mind in Conflict: The Interplay of Affect and Cognition in Consumer Decision Making , 1999 .

[16]  Julie R. Irwin,et al.  Buying/Selling Price Preference Reversals: Preference for Environmental Changes in Buying Versus Selling Modes , 1994 .

[17]  Randall S. Peterson,et al.  Revising the value pluralism model: Incorporating social content and context postulates. , 1996 .

[18]  J. Beattie,et al.  Predicting perceived differences in tradeoff difficulty , 2001 .

[19]  Paul Slovic,et al.  The Construction of Preference: The Construction of Preference: An Overview , 2006 .

[20]  J. Sweller.  COGNITIVE LOAD THEORY, LEARNING DIFFICULTY, AND INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN , 1994 .

[21]  Carmen Tanner,et al.  Taboos and conflicts in decision making: Sacred values, decision difficulty, and emotions , 2008, Judgment and Decision Making.

[22]  P. Tetlock,et al.  Taboo Trade‐offs: Reactions to Transactions That Transgress the Spheres of Justice , 1997 .

[23]  Jonathan D. Cohen,et al.  An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment , 2001, Science.

[24]  Robert Cameron Mitchell,et al.  Using Surveys to Value Public Goods: The Contingent Valuation Method , 1989 .

[25]  Timothy D. Wilson,et al.  Introspection, Attitude Change, and Attitude-Behavior Consistency: the Disruptive Effects of Explaining Why we Feel the Way we Do , 1989 .

[26]  Mary Frances Luce,et al.  The impact of emotional tradeoff difficulty on decision behavior. , 2001 .