Is It More Wrong to Care Less? The Effects of “More” and “Less” on the Quantity (In)Sensitivity of Protected Values

Morally-motivated decision making has recently emerged as an especially relevant domain of study for understanding cultural conflict. Baron and Spranca (1997) have proposed that people hold protected values that are protected against being traded off for other goods. One of the most characteristic properties of protected values is quantity insensitivity, meaning that holders of these values are relatively insensitive to the consequences of their actions. However, recent research suggests that quantity insensitivity may be a highly context-dependent property of protected values (Bartels & Medin, 2007). To examine the context-dependency of quantity sensitivity, we asked participants if one harmful act was less wrong than five harmful acts and if five harmful acts were more wrong than one harmful act. Participants were relatively insensitive to the magnitude of the consequences in response to the first question, but highly quantity sensitive in response to the second question. This effect was amplified for people who held protected values – they were both more and less quantity sensitive than people without protected values in the respective conditions. We propose that this effect is due to the different frames of reference elicited by each question.