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Rape, money, and the psychology of taboo
Author(s) -
Shen Francis X.
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/jasp.12065
Subject(s) - taboo , psychology , harm , liberian dollar , social psychology , context (archaeology) , metric (unit) , test (biology) , vignette , law , economics , paleontology , operations management , finance , political science , biology
Policy and legal decision making sometimes requires difficult assessments about how to translate the harm of sexual assault into dollar amounts. A web‐based experiment ( n = 743) was designed to test the psychology of taboo theory in this important context. The experiment included two unique features. First, subjects were randomly assigned to assess vignettes in either a dollar metric, a 7‐point harm scale metric, or a years‐in‐jail metric. Second, subjects were given the opportunity, but not required, to provide a comment when making their assessment. Assignment to the dollar metric treatment group resulted in subjects freely expressing significantly more constitutive incommensurability comments. The effect was most pronounced when the level of sexual assault in the vignette was greatest.