The Influence of Normative Relative Importance on the Perceived Importance of Information

Abstract

The experiment addressed the issue of what makes information important. The effects of three factors — category membership, normative relative importance, and goal-relatedness — were examined. Since these factors are difficult to isolate in existing schemas and categories, training materials were used to create a new schema for a fictitious insect family. The results indicated that all three factors were influencing the perceived importance of information to some extent. However, normative relative importance appeared to influence a writing task more strongly than a rating task.