The Salience of Relevant Others and Its Effect on Individual and Joint Preferences: An Experimental Investigation

This article offers an approach to joint decision making that is an extension of the key informant approach. MBAs and their household partners were either prompted to or told not to take each other into consideration in stating their preferences for MBA jobs. The household partners came significantly closer to representing the joint position as a result of the prompt than did the MBAs; they were also more accurate in their perception of the other group's preferences. It is concluded that a key informant's awareness that a decision is joint does not by itself enhance his/her accuracy in predicting joint preferences; rather, accuracy depends on a key informant's knowledge of the other's preferences.