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

By Philip Tetlock, Orie V Kristel, S. Elson, Melanie C. Green, J. Lerner, Sarah E. Bassett, Rachel Szteiter, M. Berkowitz. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000

1,200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f2b591a0d9a513ce2230ab9eb793f3e4cf6394a

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Citations in the corpus

Asymmetrical Effects of Justice Sensitivity Perspectives on Prosocial and Antisocial Behavior (2005, background): “Individuals are motivated to reduce feelings of guilt by subsequent prosocial acts (e.g., Carlsmith and Gross, 1969; Freedman et al., 1967; Konecni, 1972; Konoske et al., 1979), by penance, or by “moral cleansing” strategies ( Tetlock et al., 2000 ).”
Taboo Trade-Offs, Relational Framing, and the Acceptability of Exchanges (2005, background): “Whereas liberals and conservatives find efforts to monetize babies, body parts, and basic rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship abhorrent, we find that among libertarians the objections to these types of transactions wane (Tetlock et al., 2000).”
The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. (2001, background): “To say that moral reasoning is a conscious process means that the process is intentional, effortful, and controllable and that the reasoner is aware that it is going on (Bargh, 1994).”
Revisiting External Validity: Concerns About Trolley Problems and Other Sacrificial Dilemmas in Moral Psychology (2014, background): “People express outrage, report a strong sense of contempt and disgust, and fear moral contagion when they witness or even contemplate wrongdoing (Haidt, Rozin, McCauley, & Imada, 1997; Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 2008; Tetlock et al., 2000).”
Happiness, Health, or Relationships? Managerial Practices and Employee Well-Being Tradeoffs (2007, background): “…and long-term innovation (March, 1991), setting goals that increase performance but may encourage unethical behavior (Schweitzer et al., 2004), and performing tasks such as layoffs that may achieve a greater good but harm others in the process (Molinsky & Margolis, 2005; Tetlock et al., 2000).”
How Quick Decisions Illuminate Moral Character (2013, background): “In one study, Tetlock et al. (2000) showed that people judged an agent who engaged in extended consideration of a taboo trade-off—a moral dilemma that requires one to consider the value of something that social conventions deem ‘‘invaluable’’ (e.g., a person’s life)—more harshly, regardless of…”
Influence of deontological versus consequentialist orientations on act choices and framing effects: when principles are more important than consequences (2008, background): “We believe that our items probe aspects of PVs that are close to Tetlock’s understanding of PVs (sacred values): such values are neither tradeable, compromisable, nor can they even be questionable (Tetlock et al., 2000).”
Necessary Evils and Interpersonal Sensitivity in Organizations (2005, background): “Harming one party to benefit another represents a taboo tradeoff (Fiske & Tetlock, 1997; Tetlock, Kristel, Elson, Green, & Lerner, 2000), throwing the justifiability of the act into deeper question than when the target is the beneficiary and must absorb harm to realize a gain.”
Lying to Level the Playing Field: Why People May Dishonestly Help or Hurt Others to Create Equity (2010, background): “People are motivated to maintain relationships and defend against threatening ideas (Chen et al., 1996; Tetlock et al., 2000), and they can also very easily construct post hoc reasons to justify their actions and judgments (Gazzaniga, 1985; Nisbett and Wilson, 1977).”
Thinking the unthinkable: sacred values and taboo cognitions. (2003, background): “Tetlock et al. [ 9 ] advanced a sacred value protection model (SVPM) that asserted that, when sacred values come under secular assault, people struggle to protect their private selves and public identities from moral contamination by the impure thoughts and deeds implied in the taboo proposals.”