Are Protected Values Quantity Sensitive?

Rumen IlievNorthwestern 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

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*

Χ2 statistics

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