Saturday, October 29, 2011

Constraints: Trade-Off Reasoning

Tetlock, P. E. (2000). Coping with trade-offs: Psychological constraints and political implications. In A. Lupia, M. D. McCubbins, & S. Popkin (Eds.), Elements of reason: Cognition, choice, and the bounds of rationality (pp. 239–263). Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK. Retrieved from

Phillip Tetlock’s research has long explored trade-off reasoning. He has identified three major categories of constraints affecting trade-off reasoning:

Incommensurability: People have difficulty making a trade-off when the trade-off involves outcomes that are valued in qualitatively distinct ways. People don’t come with ready-made scales for comparing, for example, the opportunity to further their education versus the cost of paying off student loan debt. When asked to make these decisions, individual choices are influenced by the presentation of the decisions and do not display transitivity or consistent preferences.

Emotional responses: Emotion-laden trade-offs, where a highly valued outcomes is surrendered or a highly disvalued outcomes accepted, often lead people to “spread the alternatives” by emphasizing the worth of the outcomes that they chose and derogating the worth of the outcome that they surrendered. In part because losses can seem more important than gains, coping with losses can lead to a denial of losses.

It is not always possible to spread the alternatives. In this case, it may feel extremely uncomfortable, even disgusting, to acknowledge that one has made a trade-off. This “constitutive incommensurability” occurs when one would have to, for example, find a way to decide between two immoral outcomes. One may want to choose a crude metric by which to compare the immorality of these outcomes, the number of lives lost, for example, but feel extremely uncomfortable doing so.

Fear of criticism: We know that other people will be less motivated to “spread the alternatives” in a way that favors our decision than we are. In fact, if other people are aware that an individual is making moral trade-offs, they may judge him to be immoral or insane, feel anger, contempt, and disgust, and seek to punish or ostracize the individual.

It should be noted that people may happily make a trade-off when the fact of the trade-off is disguised, or when the trade off is between maintaining the status quo and pursuing a positive, but costly, outcome.

It should also be noted that people may sometimes admire an individual who is willing to make hard trade-offs. In America, for example, the “thoughtful statesman” script values a politician who is able to balance equally valid interests and make the best, albeit difficult, choice. In America, however, the “opportunistic vaccilator” script also exists, in which a politician is thought to “flip flop” on an issue just to win votes. Likewise, a leader who refused to compromise and displays a rigid mindset may be portrayed as either a demagogue or a principled leader (Tetlock, 2000). In this experiment by Tetlock et al., only participants who were primed with the “thoughtful statesman” script favored speeches that acknowledged trade-offs. Participants receiving neutral primes and participants receiving an anti-trade-off prime responded with similar negativity to speeches acknowledging trade-offs.

However, where a debate is highly polarized, acknowledging trade-offs may lead to negative responses regardless of the position taken. In a study on attitudes towards abortion, Tetlock et al. found that supporters of the fictional politician’s position were galled that he acknowledged the legitimacy of an alternate perspective and the opponents of his position were galled that he could acknowledge the legitimacy of their views and take an opposite stance.

For an application of this theory, consider responses to President Obama's speech seeking to detail common ground between proponents and opponents of abortion-access.

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