The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,387

student, husband, wife, supervisor, employee, customer, neighbor, stranger), a context (home, street, school, workplace), and a resource (food, money, land, housing, time, advice, sex, labor). To be a socially competent member of a culture is to have assimilated a large set of these norms.

Take friendship. Couples who are close friends operate mainly on the model of Communal Sharing. They freely share food at a dinner party, and they do each other favors without keeping score. But they may also recognize special circumstances that call for some other relational model. They may work together on a task in which one is an expert and gives orders to the other (Authority Ranking), split the cost of gas on a trip (Equality Matching), or transact the sale of a car at its blue book value (Market Pricing).

Infractions of a relational model are moralized as straightforwardly wrong. Within the Communal Sharing model that usually governs a friendship, it is wrong for one person to stint on sharing. Within the special case of Equality Matching of gas on a trip, an infraction consists of failing to pay for one’s share. Equality Matching, with its assumption of a continuing reciprocal relationship, allows for loose accounting, as when the ranchers of Shasta County compensated each other for damage with roughly equivalent favors and agreed to lump it when a small act of damage went uncompensated.181 Market Pricing and other Rational-Legal models are less forgiving. A diner who leaves an expensive restaurant without paying cannot count on the owner to let him make it up in the long run, or simply to lump it. The owner is more likely to call the police.

When a person violates the terms of a relational model he or she has tacitly agreed to, the violator is seen as a parasite or cheater and becomes a target of moralistic anger. But when a person applies one relational model to a resource ordinarily governed by another, a different psychology comes into play. That person doesn’t violate the rules so much as he or she doesn’t “get” them. The reaction can range from puzzlement, embarrassment, and awkwardness to shock, offense, and rage.182 Imagine, for example, a diner thanking a restaurateur for an enjoyable experience and offering to have him over for dinner at some point in the future (treating a Market Pricing interaction as if it were governed by Communal Sharing). Conversely, imagine the reaction at a dinner party (Communal Sharing) if a guest pulled out his wallet and offered to pay the host for the meal (Market Pricing), or if the host asked a guest to wash the pots while the host relaxed in front of the television (Equality Matching). Likewise, imagine that the guest offered to sell his car to the host, and then drove a hard bargain on the price, or the host suggested that the couples swap partners for a half-hour of sex before everyone went home for the evening.

The emotional response to a relational mismatch depends on whether it is accidental or deliberate, which model is substituted for which, and the nature of the resource. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has suggested that the psychology of taboo—a reaction of outrage to certain thoughts being aired—comes into play with resources that are deemed sacred.183 A sacred value is one that may not be traded off against anything else. Sacred resources are usually governed by the primal models of Communality and Authority, and they trigger the taboo reaction when someone treats them with the more advanced models of Equality Matching or Market Pricing. If someone offered to purchase your child (suddenly thrusting a Communal Sharing relationship under the light of Market Pricing), you would not ask how much he was offering but would be offended at the very idea. The same is true for an offer to buy a personal gift or family heirloom that has been bestowed upon you, or to pay you for betraying a friend, a spouse, or your country. Tetlock found that when students were asked their opinion on the pros and cons of an open market for sacred resources like votes, military service, jury duty, body organs, or babies put up for adoption, most of them did not articulate a good case against the practice (such as that the poor might sell their organs out of desperation) but expressed outrage at being asked. Typical “arguments” were “This is degrading, dehumanizing, and unacceptable” and “What kind of people are we becoming?”

The psychology of taboo is not completely irrational.184 To