Amish Dedication to Farming and Adoption of Organic Dairy Systems - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 234

café in town” when they are making decisions about their farm (Bell 2004 , p. 138).
The tendency of farmers to avoid or be averse to the uncertainties associated with
change may be one of the main reasons more do not practice organic agriculture
(Fairweather 1998 ; Clark et al. 1999 ; de Buck 2001 ;Bell 2004 ).

12.2.3 Value Loss Aversion

Value Loss Aversion 8 is another oikonomia -bounded rationality term that can lead
to principled satisficing and is a variant of the more well-known “loss aversion”.
Loss aversion dissuades decision makers from making significant changes because
they are more concerned about losses on past investments or choices than the
potential gains from future decisions, (Kahneman and Tversky 1979 ; Samuelson
and Zeckhauser 1988 ; Kahneman et al. 1991 ) and this may lead to information
satisficing. When applied to the Amish, the concept needs to be expanded to
consider their attention to protecting their common values within the church and
the community. At a community level, strong value loss aversion may translate into
norms and rules, and hence individual behavior focused on the potential losses over
possible or even likely gains, so that decision makers are more likely to maintain
the status quo. This is especially relevant to the Amish farmers in our sample,
who appear to often display what we call here “value loss aversion”, wherein
their hesitation about new activities, technologies, or even information is based on
the sense that change inherently threatens core Christian family values relative to
traditional behaviors in the vein of (Chua and Juurikkala 2008 ).

12.2.4 Value Anchoring/Extremetization

Anchoring is a way to drastically simplify complex problems so that the decision-
maker does not fully consider the advantages and disadvantages of an entire
decision; instead, they may focus on one aspect of the decision and weigh that
outcome heavily (Tversky and Kahneman 1974 ; Gigerenzer and Goldstein 1996 ;
Todd and Gigerenzer 2000 ; Lunneryd and Öhlmér 2006 ). The issues that decision
makers focus on which lead to anchoring and “extremetization” may be closely
connected with values, hence the term “value anchoring” which is inspired by
the other oikonomia-bounded rationality issues illustrated earlier inspired by Chua
and Juurikkala ( 2008 ). Some anchors are so extreme that they do not seem to be
well grounded economic or ecological indicators of the core decision, and this
phenomenon will be denoted as “extremetization” (Brock 2010 ). For example,
the idea that organic farmers may be cheating on their practices may cause