Don't Even Think About It: The Psychology of The Unthinkable

We live in reactionary times.

Have you noticed?

Every ingroup is policing their moral boundaries hard. If you say anything that challenges or questions the dominant beliefs, you get kicked out immediately. Nobody asks you to clarify or elaborate. They just revoke your membership.

When the movie Indecent Proposal came out, I was a kid. You probably know the plot. A rich guy offers a married woman $1 million to sleep with him. The proposal ruins her marriage, but they reunite at the end. I don't know about you, but the idea that money for sex would stir up controversy feels pretty quaint these days. So much has changed since the 90s. It feels like a different world altogether.

Psychologists have a term for what happens in the movie. It's called a taboo trade-off. Basically, you're attaching money or something morally suspect to a relationship that's considered sacred according to religious and cultural values.

You're not even supposed to think about an offer like the one in Indecent Proposal. If you do, then you run afoul of what psychologists call the mere contemplation effect. Even if you make the "right" decision, you still enjoy a healthy dose of society's judgment and moral outrage. You had one too many thoughts about it.

Now you're guilty.