Protected Values and Heuristics and Biases Approach Rumen Iliev and Douglas Medin

1. Protected Values and Heuristics and Biases Approach Rumen Iliev and Douglas Medin Northwestern University Hypothesis Stronger focus of attention, or more cognitive resources dedicated to a concept related to PV, could lead to less attention to peripheral information, thus to less anchoring affect for people who hold PVs on a particular issue. Method The same participants from Study 1.a completed the anchoring task after they had finished with the previous tasks. The five possible anchors (5, 10, 20, 50, 100) had equal chance for appearance. Results The mean target answer was 26.7, SD= 17.6, whereas the true answer to the question is about 43%. The Pearson correlation between the target and the anchor across all subjects was r =.29, p<.05. There were no difference in the means or standard deviations between the two groups. Abstract Protected values, which are values resisting any trade-offs, have recently entered the field of decision making and have challenged some of the main assumptions and theoretical models in the area. So far, the main efforts in research of protected values have been directed toward establishing adequate definition, identifying their main properties and describing some of their psychological correlates. In this paper we suggest an extension of this approach, focusing on the cognitive interpretation of the problem. We hypothesize that holding protected values will be related to the representation of information and thus will impact performance in some well known decision making tasks. We compared people who hold protected values on abortions with people who do not, and found different patterns of performance in conjunction fallacy and anchoring tasks. Participants with protected values showed higher rates of conjunction fallacy, but essentially no anchoring effect. Protected Values For long time the dominant paradigm in decision making research has been the utility theory, which relies on mechanisms of trade-offs to determine the value of an outcome. However, in the last decade there was increasing interest in morally motivated decisions, which proved to be challenging for the existing utility models. B aron and Spranca (1997) defined protected values (PVs) as “… those that resist trade-offs with other values, particularly with economic values”. Similarly, Tetlock et al. (1996) raised the question of existence of sacred values, which later (Tetlock et al., 2000) were defined 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”. Features like infinite utility and restrictions of any trade offs could raise reasonable concerns if PVs exist at all. However, acts of environmental activists, anti-abortion groups, suicide bombers and self-immolating monks clearly demonstrates that PVs may exist in their strongest form. In the present research we explore the idea that protected values, being highly important, could have an impact to the information representation, thus people holding PVs could perform differently on some well established decision making tasks, depending on the content of the scenario. In the next part we compare the performance of PVs and no PVs subjects on anchoring and conjunction fallacy tasks. Our hypothesis is that PVs make part of the information more salient for the subject, and thus concentrate cognitive resources more on some cues of the situation, relatively ignoring others, and as such people with and without PVs will have different performance in relevant cognitive tasks. Hypothesis PVs could lead to higher salience of particular common features, thus to higher representativeness of the target to a particular group. If so, we could expect higher rates of conjunction fallacy among people holding PVs, but only for scenarios relevant to particular PVs. Method 128 Northwestern University undergraduates participated for course credit. First they were given a questionnaire on PVs, where on of the questions asked about their opinion on abortions. If they checked “this is unacceptable under any circumstances” they were considered to hold PVs on abortion. In addition we had one more abortion relevant scenario, implying that the person described is pro-life, and one neutral scenario, implying that the person is an accountant. If a subject judged that a conjunction is more likely than one of its part, it was counted as conjunction fallacy. The responses of the PVa subjects did not correlate with the anchor, r=.06, while the noPVa responses were significantly correlated, r=.37, p<.001. To test for a difference in the slopes, we ran regression analyses, regressing target answer on the anchor and PVa as well as their interaction. The first model showed three influential cases, further than 3 standard deviations from the regression line, and these cases turned out to be the most extreme responses to the target, 70(noPVa), 80(noPVa) and 80(PVa). After deleting these influential cases, we ran the model again, and found a significant interaction between PVa and the anchor b=-.13, p<.05). The two correlation coefficients now were .42 (p<.05) for the noPVa group and -.02 for the PVa group, suggesting that an anchoring effect occurred only for subjects without PVa,. Results 39 of all subjects (31%) showed PVs on abortion (PVa). For the consequent analysis we combined the two abortion relevant scenarios in one measure, combined abortion scenarios. The neutral scenario fallacy showed no relation with the PVa measure, while the combined fallacy was higher for people with PVs (F(1,127)=3.64, p=.06). We also explored if the combined abortion fallacies were related to the neutral scenario and rune 2x2 (PVs, neutral fallacy) ANOVA. The results showed main effect of the neutral scenario (F(1,124)=43.52, p<.05) , as well as interaction between PVs and neutral fallacy (F(1,124)=4.68, p<.05). In other words, perhaps for more normative thinkers or for people who knew and might have applied probability theory, having a PVa did not affect whether a combined abortion conjunction fallacy was made, which is a plausible expectation. However, less normative readers revealed a relationship between holding PVa and occurrence of the fallacy, but only for the related scenarios. Fig. 3 Two separate regression slopes for the two separate groups of subjects. After deleting three outliers (answers higher than 70%) the correlation between the anchor and the target was significant only for the no PV group. A regression analusis s showed significant interaction between PVs and the anchor (b=-.13, p<.05) Fig.1 Conjunction fallacies for each of the three scenarios. Summary and conclusion The goal of this research was to explore the hypothesis that strong moral positions, in this case PVs, could influence the representation of information and the performance in decision making tasks. Our findings show that PV did influence performance, depending on the relevance of the task information to persons PVs. However, there is no unequivocal conclusions if PVs heart or help normative decision making. In the case with conjunction fallacy, PVs were related with less normative answers for the relevant scenarios, while in the anchoring task, people with PVs showed no anchoring. In short, this experiment demonstrates the possibility for exploration of the link between moral stands and cognitive processes and application of heuristics and biases paradigm to ethical research. Study 1.a Conjunction fallacy Conjunction fallacy is a logical error which occurs when the probability of an event happening ( is judged to be lower than the probability that a single property that is part of the event happens. A conjunction fallacy would be to judge a person to be French as more likely than the probability that he is European. From a logical point of view it is an error since if AB, P(B) ≤ P(A); in other words, the highest possible value that P(B) could have is the probability of the inclusive set A. For this task we adjusted two of the original Tversky&Kahneman (1983) scenarios. The abortion relevant one was: Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. And the subjects had to estimate the probability of two statements about Linda. A. Linda is a bank teller. B. Linda is a bank teller and pro-choice. Fig. 2 Combined conjunction fallacy as function of PVs and neutral fallacy. PV did matter only for people who failed the neutral scenario. Study 1.b Anchoring For this task we used the basic anchoring paradigm (Wilson et al., 1996), according which the answer to a target question could be influenced by an anchor of non-related information. For example, we used the following scenario, where the number of years is the anchor and the percentage of abortions is the target: In recent research, published in Netherlands, it was estimated that the percentage of women who have had an abortion in Europe almost doubled in the last 20 years. What is your best guess for this percentage in the USA nowadays? Where we varied the number of years from 5 to 100. Acknowledgements We are very grateful to Dan Bartels, Will Bennis, Sonya Suchdeva and Sara Unsworth for their valuable comments, as well as Brittany Koscher for part of the data collection.