The Concept of Weight in Judgment and Decision Making: A Review and Some Unifying Proposals.

The concept of weight or importance is central to analyses of judgment and decision making. However, different theoretical approaches disagree about the interpretation and operational definition of weight. The purpose of this paper is 1 to review the various approaches to judgment and decision making, and to consider how each defines weight, 2 to summarize some of the variables that can influence the weight estimates of each approach, 3 to propose a simplifying and hopefully unifying definition of weight, 4 to explore some of the consequences and predictions of this new approach, and 5 to make some suggestions for both language revision and future research which would aid in the development of the weight concept. Author