JUDGMENTS OF RELATIVE IMPORTANCE IN DECISION-MAKING - GLOBAL VS LOCAL INTERPRETATIONS OF SUBJECTIVE WEIGHT

Because most choices involve alternatives that have both advantages and disadvantages, many issues in decision research concern the way people evaluate trade-offs among conflicting goals or attributes. The attributes of the alternatives are often perceived to be of unequal importance to the decision, leading to questions about people's understanding and use of "relative importance" information to characterize their own and other people's decisions. Global interpretations of relative importance consider it to be a fixed attitude of the decision maker, a stable characteristic that does not depend on the particular stimuli involved, provided that the stimuli do not disturb the person's implicit contextual assumptions. By contrast, local interpretations of relative importance hold it to be an assessment, like preference itself, that depends on both the personal characteristics of the decision maker and the stimuli. These interpretations are compared in an experiment that asked subjects to (1) provide their own relative importance ratings and preference orders, (2) use the relative importance ratings of a target person to infer the target person's preference order, and (3) infer the relative importance ratings of a target person based on the target person's preference order. The way that people's decision patterns covaried with their relative importance judgments across stimulus sets largely violated global interpretations, although some of the evidence was ambiguous. Specific interpretations of relative importance are discussed, as well as factors that seem likely to affect people's selection of an interpretation. © 1990.