Are Protected Values Quantity
Sensitive?
Rumen Iliev
Northwestern University
Overview
• Sacred/protected values
– Definitions
– Properties
– Challenges
• Context effects in a choice set
– Examples
– Connection to protected values
• Empirical study on context effects in the moral
domain
• Conclusion
• Future directions
Sacred/Protected Values
• Tetlock et al. (2000) defined sacred values as
“any value that a moral community implicitly or
explicitly treats as possessing infinite and
transcendental significance that precludes
comparisons, tradeoffs, or indeed any other
mingling with bounded or secular values”.
• Baron and Spranca (1997) defined protected
values as “… those that resist tradeoffs with
other values, particularly with economic values”.
• The rejection of tradeoffs is a challenge for utility
based models in decision making
Sacred/Protected Values:
Properties
• Sacred values appear to have distinctive
properties that make them different from
secular values:
– infinite utility
– omission bias
– quantity insensitivity
– denial of the need for tradeoffs
– moral obligation
– emotional responses
Sacred/Protected Values:
Challenges
• Challenges for research on sacred values
– By definition a person who endorses sacred/protected
values would reject a tradeoff (at least of sacred for
secular goods)
– Most of the tasks exploring the properties of protected
values rely on explicit tradeoffs
• Would you harm 5 species in order to save 10 other species?
• Is destroying 1 acre of old grown forest less wrong than
destroying 2 acres?
• How much money would you accept in order to give up your
land?
Sacred/Protected Values:
Alternative approaches
• Alternative approaches
– Indirect influence on cognitive processes
• Stroop interference
– Heuristics and Biases
• Representativeness and Anchoring
– Context Effects
• Influencing choice preferences via “decoy”
alternatives
Attraction Effect
• Two alternative
choice set
• P(alt.2)<P(alt.3)
Attraction Effect
• Two alternative
choice set
– P(alt.2)<P(alt.3)
• Three alternative
choice set (alt.1 is a
decoy)
– But
P(alt.2|alt.1) >P(alt.3|alt.1)
Compromise effect
• Alt. 2 becomes a
compromise when
alt.1 is added to the
choice set
• P(alt.2)<P(alt.3)
P(alt.2|alt.1) >P(alt.3|alt.1)
Why Context Effects Are
Interesting?
• For traditional judgment and decision making:
– Independence of irrelevant alternatives:
• The decision maker has complete preference order of all
options
– Pragmatic purposes
• One can influence market purchases
• For morally motivated decision making:
– If sacred/protected values imply infinite utility on a
particular dimension we should not expect context
effects when moral issues are at stake
– Even thought there is significant amount of research
on moral-secular tradeoffs, relatively little has been
done on moral-moral tradeoffs
Experiment 1
• Participants:
– 77 NU undergraduates participated for a course credit
• Stimuli:
– 12 choice sets:
•
•
•
•
•
Abortions
Endangered species
Wrongly convicted prisoners
Starving children
Example: Tradeoff between preventing more abortions or
saving more starving children
– 6 attraction scenarios and 6 compromise scenarios
– Protected values questions
• Action X is unacceptable no matter what the benefits.
Example: Compromise Scenario
Condition 1
» Plan A will prevent 2000 abortions and save 10 species
» Plan B will prevent 3000 abortions and save 8 species
» Plan C will prevent 4000 abortions and save 6 species
Condition 2
» Plan A will prevent 1000 abortions and save 12 species
» Plan B will prevent 2000 abortions and save 10 species
» Plan C will prevent 3000 abortions and save 8 species
Example: Compromise
Example: Attraction Scenario
Condition 1
» Plan A will prevent 2000 abortions and save 10 species
» Plan B will prevent 3000 abortions and save 8 species
» Plan C will prevent 2900 abortions and save 7 species
Condition 2
» Plan A will prevent 1900 abortions and save 9 species
» Plan B will prevent 2000 abortions and save 10 species
» Plan C will prevent 3000 abortions and save 8 species
Example: Attraction
Overview of results
• Very strong attraction effects but
essentially no compromise effects
• Little difference as a function of whether
one or more dimensions involve a sacred
value
Experiment 1: Summary
• PVs were significant predictor of subjects’
choice (R2 = .22, p<.05)
• Overall attraction effect, but no reliable
compromise effect
• Attraction effect was found even in case
when people had PVs on only one of the
dimensions
Experiment 1: Limitations
• Randomized between-subject condition
but not within-subjects
• Positive framed scenarios but negatively
framed protected values
– abortions prevented/ species saved
– actions prohibited
• No control comparison
– may be compromise effects are less reliable
and more difficult to detect
Experiment 2
• Within-subject randomization
• Negatively framed scenarios
– Damage control scenarios where your plan will cause
more damage or another dimension
• Updated dimensions
– abortions, dolphins, homeless people, starving
children (total of 18 scenarios)
• Secular choices
– Laptops, cameras, iPods, tires (total of 8 scenarios)
• Participants:
– 61 NU undergraduates participated for a course credit
Χ2 statistics
Experiment 1:Positive framing
Experiment 2:Negative framing
PVs
Compromise
Attraction
Compromise
Attraction
None
.01
16.30*
.323
14.97*
Only one
8.76*(reversed)
17.52*
12.98*(reversed)
6.30*
Both
.50
8.59*
19.30*
21.00*
Secular
Compromise
Attraction
21.49*
28.88*
Summary
• PVs predict the chosen alternative
• Scenarios that involve morally relevant items
show typical attraction effect but no consistent
compromise effects
• Protected values did not suppress attraction
effects
• Morally relevant scenarios did not show
compromise effect when none of the dimensions
involved protected values
Conclusion
• Reliable attraction effect is consistent with the hypothesis for implicit
trade offs even when sacred values are included
• From modeling perspective, the attraction effect suggests that
sacred values could be modeled using dimensional weights
• The difference between attraction and compromise effects could be
due to differential impact on cognitive processes when morally
relevant tradeoffs are considered
– value-shift explanations dealt with attraction effect only
– reasons based choice and loss aversion explanations were focused on
compromise effect only
• From pragmatic perspective, adding a decoy alternative might
contribute for approval or disapproval of a proposed plan
Future Directions
• Adding a justification condition
• Context effects in voting behavior
– adding a third candidate during an election
race
• Context effect in believe propagation
– Interactions between neighboring nodes in a
social/expert network
Acknowledgments
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Doug Medin
Andrzej Tarlowski
Craig Joseph
Dan Bartels
Sara Unsworth
Sonya Sachdeva
Will Bennis