People avoid confronting sacred-secular contradictions until forced, then embrace rhetorical redefinitions.

Evidence

The model predicts that, without pressure to confront secular–sacred contradictions, people will be motivated to look away and be easily distracted by rhetorical smokescreens. However, when gaze-aversion is not an option, people will welcome rhetorical redefinitions of situations that transform taboo trade-offs into more acceptable routine trade-offs (one secular value against another, the sort of mental operation one performs every time one strolls into a supermarket) or tragic trade-offs (one sacred value against another, such as honor versus life, the stuff of classical Greek tragedies). — Philip E. Tetlock, Thinking the unthinkable, 15

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the reader’s inquiry into whether moral correction against threat-hardened beliefs backfires: the SVPM here predicts people faced with taboo trade-offs will seek redefinitions rather than revise their sacred commitments — a mechanism explaining backfire.
• DEFINE: Defines taboo trade-offs and distinguishes them from routine and tragic trade-offs — the core taxonomy motivating moral outrage.
• XREF: connects to: People experiencing cognitive dissonance often avoid or reinterpret contradictory information rather than abandoning their beliefs when confronted with truth. — Festinger’s Law

Related

• Merely contemplating trade-offs on sacred values provokes moral outrage beyond cognitive confusion (similarity 0.79)