Thinking and Deciding

290 CHOICE UNDER CERTAINTY
if his commander tells him to kill innocent people); a good scholar must seek and
publish the truth (even if someone will use it to promote racist doctrine); a good
politician must defend the interests of her constituents (even if she must trample on
the interests of others); a lawyer’s duty is to his client (even if he must help his client
commit perjury). This is not to say that a good soldier should not obey his commander,
and so forth: It is to say that in doing so he ought to be aware of what goals he
may be sacrificing. Soldiers, scholars, politicians, and lawyers are people, and they
have goals other than those associated with their roles. On some occasions, these
other goals may outweigh the goal stemming from the work role. Single-minded
focus on a work goal reflects insufficient search for goals, or neglect of goals even
after they are found.
An interesting practical example of the effect of single-mindedness comes from
a study by Gardiner and Edwards (1975). In California, proposals for “developing”
the Pacific coastline (housing developments, for example) are controversial. Some
Californians favor them, focusing on the economic advantages of increased employment
and the like. Others oppose them, focusing on the environmental disadvantages
of increased demands on resources and physical unattractiveness. The California
Coastal Commission, which had the task of approving or disapproving such proposals,
was often completely polarized, with members who held these opposite views
constantly at each other’s throats. Gardiner and Edwards were aware that each proposal
could be ranked as better or worse on the two dimensions. Some proposals had
relatively great economic advantages combined with relatively little environmental
disadvantages, and these proposals, they felt, clearly ought to be given priority.
Gardiner and Edwards asked twelve knowledgeable subjects, including two members
of the Coastal Commission, to rank order several proposals like the ones the
commission normally considered. The subjects, like the commission, fell into two
groups — prodevelopment and proenvironment. These holistic ratings showed very
little agreement between the two groups of subjects. Members of each group were
paying attention only to the dimension that was most important to them. Then the
researchers asked subjects to carry out a MAUT (multiattribute) analysis (p. 341, in
which subjects individually rated each proposal on each of the major dimensions and
then assigned a weight to each dimension. Of course, the prodevelopment subjects
gave greater importance to the economic dimensions, and the proenvironment subjects
gave greater importance to the environmental dimensions. Nonetheless, each
group now gave some weight to the other group’s favored dimension. When new
rankings were calculated from these analyses, there was now very good agreement
between the two groups. Some proposals apparently were fairly satisfying to both
groups. This became readily apparent only when the decision procedure forced attention
to dimensions that each group had considered unimportant, as well as those
that it initially considered important.
We conclude that attention to a single, dominant dimension can lead both to
unnecessary disagreement between groups and to violation of each individual’s true
preferences. Making tradeoffs helps — when we have the time to do it.
The tendency to neglect goals that seem less important may be at work in the