Introduction

It is becoming increasingly common to use scenic-quality or -preference ratings as a way to incorporate a psychological component into design, management, and planning decisions. This component has proved to be an effective tool in such settings. It thus may be rather surprising to discover that the role or theoretical status of preference within psychology is by no means a settled question.

One view of preference is as an indicator of aesthetic judgment. Research carried out in this framework has tended to focus on stimulus properties, with the primary emphasis being on stimulus complexity (Berlyne, 1960). In this context, the motivational impact of the stimulus is the central control; cognition is not assumed to play a significant role.

An alternative view of preference involves decision making and choice. Perhaps a preference judgment reflects the complex calculations assumed to be involved in any process of choosing among alternatives. According to the influential rationality model, one multiplies perceived value and subjective probability to determine the desirability of a given choice. The choice with the highest value would then be the most preferred. Although desirability of the alternative would seem to play a central role, attempts have generally been made to hold this portion of the equation constant by assigning dollar values. Thus the emphasis in research carried out in this framework has been on the probability component, with particular interest in how people deal with the concept of risk (Slovic, Fischhoff, and Lichtenstein, 1976; Tversky and Kahneman, 1981).