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Abstract
Although consumers typically expect organizations to profit from marketing goods and services, they also believe that certain organizations, like those that focus on religion and health, should prioritize communal obligations. Indeed, consumers may find it morally distressing when communally focused organizations use overtly commercial marketing strategies like rebranding or value-based pricing. We demonstrate how moral distress and consumer backlash result from such taboo trade-offs and investigate when communal-sharing rhetoric for religious and pharmaceutical marketing reduces distress. Communal justifications used by communally focused organizations are particularly effective when consumers are not closely monitoring the motives of the organization or when the product is need-based. However, communal justifications become less effective and market-pricing justifications become more effective when consumers are attuned to the persuasive intentions of the organization. Implications for consumer goals are discussed.

UN General Assembly speeches concerning the Middle East conflict made by representatives of Israel, Arab countries (Egypt and Syria), the USA, and the USSR were scored for integrative complexity. Speeches were sampled from twenty years between 1947 and 1976. Complexity of information-processing was significantly reduced in speeches made in months preceding the outbreak of war (1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973), except in the case of the USSR. Israel, which with the United States exhibited the highest levels of complexity during peacetime, showed the greatest reductions prior to war. The low level of complexity characteristic of Israeli and Arab speeches during 1976 may reflect the escalation of the Lebanese civil war or may be a predictor of a major outbreak of hostilities in the near future.

Psychologists have documented widespread public deference to "sacred values" that communities, formally or informally, exempt from tradeoffs with secular limits, like money. This work has, however, been largely confined to low-stakes settings. As the stakes rise, deference must decline because people can't write blank checks for every "sacred" cause. Shadow pricing is inevitable which sets the stage for political blame-games of varying sophistication. In a rational world, citizens would accept the necessity of such tradeoffs, but the attraction to moral absolutes is strong--perhaps even essential for social cohesion.

The purpose of this article is to present a methodology for better gauging the nature and dynamics of social and political attitudes. Starting from a particular view of attitude assessment, we show how computer-assisted interviewing can help transform the survey interview from a passive to an interactive process. Since the ultimate test of a methodological approach is its substantive yield, we shall present both specific measurement procedures and illustrative substantive results. The methodology itself, however, is quite general and readily applied to other substantive areas, thanks both to the generality of the theory of measurement of which it is a part and to the flexibility of the technology in which it is embedded.