I wrote in arecent blog关于神圣的价值观，这似乎有令人困惑的特点。As noted, Scott Atran’s 2010 bookTalking to the Enemy记录了他在印度尼西亚穆斯林恐怖分子中的人类学工作。In one study he discusses, he gave his informants this problem, for which each informant would have to choose between two of the three options:

1. Complete a successful, effective suicide bombing attack.
2. 成功完成一次有效的非自杀式炸弹袭击
3. Complete a holy, once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca.

这个谜题的产生是因为告密者通常选择2而不是1(非自杀式爆炸比自杀式爆炸更好);他们选择了3而不是2(去麦加朝圣比非自杀式爆炸要好);但他们选择了1比3(自杀式爆炸比去麦加朝圣要好)。

But both intuitively and according to standard axioms in formal theories of choice, we would expect our preferences to be transitive, meaning:If 3 > 2 and 2 > 1, then 3 > 1.

那么，当涉及到神圣的价值观时，我们该如何解释Atran的数据表明有些人似乎违反了传递性这一事实呢?

Atran himself seems to think that lack of transitivity is just a fact about sacred values. That might be a reasonable view. Lots of relations, after all, aren’t transitive. Theblood relativerelation, for example, isn’t transitive: if A is a blood relative of B and B is a blood relative of C, that doesn’t entail that A is a blood relative of C. So it could be that the comparative preferences that exist among sacred values just don’t have the orderly structure that transitivity would imply.

但我自己觉得这种观点并不令人满意，因为我不清楚拥有非传递性神圣偏好的好处(进化的、个人的或文化的)是什么。

One classic argument for why preferences are (or at leastshouldbe) transitive is known as the “money pump” argument, which is areductio ad absurdum. It starts by making the assumption that some preferences could be intransitive, and it derives an absurd consequence from that assumption. It goes like this. Suppose you prefer an apple to a banana, the banana to an orange, but the orange to the apple [thus violating transitivity]. If that were the case, I could pump money from you in the following way: if you started with the apple and I started with the orange and the banana, you would give me the apple plus a penny for the orange, since you prefer the orange to the apple. But then I could sell you the banana for the orange plus a penny, since you prefer the banana to the orange. After that, however, I could get you to give me the banana plus a penny in exchange for the apple, since you prefer the apple to the banana. But then we’re back to where we started! So if you had intransitive preferences about fruit (or whatever), that would allow me to pump money from you gradually but indefinitely. But that absurd scenario (or even something similar to it) doesn’t happen, which is good reason to think that preferences in general and for the most partaretransitive.

The money pump argument of course can’t apply specifically to the sacred choices from Atran’s study, since some of those choice only could ever be made once. Furthermore, other studies on sacred values have shown them to be insensitive to “deal sweeteners” (e.g., offering extra money or whatever doesn’t get people to budge from their sacred values). So the money pump argument is nowhere close to being a compelling argument against the idea that sacred values are intransitive. Still, it does highlight that there is something at least strange about the idea of genuinely intransitivepreferences, which in turn puts the burden on someone to say why there would be a preference system that violated transitivity. (Why, for example, would such a system have been supported by natural selection—either in biological or cultural evolution?) And after much trying, I still have a hard time seeing how that burden can be convincingly met.

So here’s what I think is going on instead.

当谈到解释人类选择的许多心理动机时，我们应该假设不同的心理系统，其中一个编码普通的、日常的功利偏好，另一个编码神圣的价值观。到目前为止，几乎每个关注神圣价值的人都会同意这两种截然不同的体系(或者至少是沿着这条线的一些东西)。My former student Adrian Pecotic, for example, also discusses the positing of two systems in his excellentMA thesis.

But what Atran doesn’t consider is the possibility that the survey responses he collected (that seem to show intransitivity) actually are evidence of his informants’oscillationbetween the two value systems. That is, for some of the choice problems he posed, his informants are relying on the sacred values system, but for others, they are relying on the ordinary utilitarian values system.

Recall the Daniel Kahneman line I quoted in Part I: “People don’t choose between things. They choose between descriptions of things.” If this is right, then in some cases people could be describing a given choice in their minds in a way that activates one system or the other, and the same choice might be described internally in two different ways.

Let’s focus on option 1, the suicide attack.

内部可以写成1u。或1 s。:

1u. Tactically effective attack in which one of our own soldiers is lost.

1 s。殉难。

重要的是,1 u。是一个描述，可能会激活普通的功利价值系统-一个响应数字，数量，增量成本和效益。1 s。当然，这是一种能够激活神圣价值体系的描述。

What I think is going on, then, is that the two choice problems involving option 1 (1 versus 2, 1 versus 3) tacitly activate different internal descriptions of 1.

When 1 is being compared to 2 (effective non-suicide attack), something like the 1u. description is activated in the mind of the person making the choice. So we have the following comparison as the first choice.

1u. Tactically effective attack in whichoneof our own soldiers is lost.

2u. Tactically effective attack in whichnoneof our own soldiers is lost.

These in turn are evaluated not by the sacred value system but by the utilitarian system, which easily evaluates 2u. as better, since no one from the home team dies in 2u.但是当1和3进行比较时，3将被认为是神圣的，现在将在这两种描述之间做出选择。

1 s。殉难。

3.朝圣。

与此比较，圣值系统值为1s。更多的高度。

With this framework in place, it’s also easy to explain why 3 > 2 appears in the data. The sacralizing description of 2 would be something like this.

2s. Jihad advances.

So it appears to me that the sacred value systems of Atran’s informants may be transitive (read over descriptions) after all. They value in this order:

1 s。(牺牲)> 3。(朝圣)> 2。(Jihad advances)

因此，在我看来，神圣价值之间的及物性的违反只是明显的——这是以下事实的产物:(1)功利主义价值体系也可以被招募来评估某些选择;(2)当功利主义价值体系被激活时，2u。> 1 u。

从技术上讲，这些看起来都很有趣。但你可能仍然想知道:什么是外卖信息?

The deeper message, it seems to me, is not just that human psychological systems can value the same thing differently under different descriptions (that is a deep point, but it’s been known in psychology for a long time). It’s rather that in one mind, two distinct value systems, each with their own coherent rules (like transitivity), cover overlapping domains, such that the same event (like a suicide bombing) can be assigned different priorities by the different systems, in relation to other events.

It is as if a priest and an economist live in the minds of each of us (including priests and economists), each with their own values, preferences, and ways of describing events. Given that, it is no wonder that we often find ourselves conflicted about matters of deep importance. It is also no wonder that hypocrisy is so common. That, however, is a story for a different blog.