ABSTRACT
The chapters in Part II are concerned with understanding how people evaluate decision alternatives. In traditional decision research it was assumed that values could be described by a single value or utility function. Recent approaches consider this to be a much too simple approach. Instead of one commensurate scale of utility, more scales have to be considered that are used in different ways by decision makers. How people assign values is a question that is not restricted to decision research but has also been important in social psychology, for example in research into attitude formation and change, and into psychological aesthetics. Forging links between cognitive and social psychological perspectives is a common theme in these chapters. Another theme is the rejection of the decision maker as a passive and dispassionate processor of information, like the stereotyped accountant whose book contains columns detailing profits and losses. Rather, the decision maker is actively searching for meaning, is seeking for, and testing hypotheses about what would produce an outcome that ‘feels right’ and that can be justified. Information is not simply analysed, it is restructured and viewed from shifting perspectives.
