Overlap of accessible information undermines the anchoring effect
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2016, Vol 11, Issue 1
Abstract
According to the Selective Accessibility Model of anchoring, the comparison question in the standard anchoring paradigm activates information that is congruent with an anchor. As a consequence, this information will be more likely to become the basis for the absolute judgment which will therefore be assimilated toward the anchor. However, if the activated information overlaps with information that is elicited by the absolute judgment itself, the preceding comparative judgment should not exert an incremental effect and should fail to result in an anchoring effect. The present studies find this result when the comparative judgment refers to a general category and the absolute judgment refers to a subset of the general category that was activated by the anchor value. For example, participants comparing the average annual temperature in New York City to a high 102 °F judged the average winter, but not summer temperature to be higher than participants making no comparison. On the other hand, participants comparing the annual temperature to a low –4 °F judged the average summer, but not winter temperature to be lower than control participants. This pattern of results was shown also in another content domain. It is consistent with the Selective Accessibility Model but difficult to reconcile with other main explanations of the anchoring effect.
Authors and Affiliations
Štěpán Bahník and Fritz Strack
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678228
- DOI -
- Views 137
- Downloads 0
Psychological aspects of the rejection of recycled water: Contamination, purification and disgust
There is a worldwide and increasing shortage of potable fresh water. Modern water reclamation technologies can alleviate much of the problem by converting wastewater directly into drinking water, but there is public resi...
The Risk-as-feelings hypothesis in a Theory-of-planned-behaviour perspective
The Theory of Planned Behaviour (TpB: Ajzen, 1985; 1991) is based on a utility framework, and the Risk-as-Feelings hypothesis (RaF: Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, & Welch, 2001) is a feelings-based behavioural model. The TpB...
Accounting for reciprocity in negotiation and social exchange
People generally adhere to the norm of reciprocity during both tacit and negotiated exchange. Emotional responses generated from profitable and unprofitable exchange facilitate the formation of motives to settle scores w...
Strategies for exploration in the domain of losses
Many decisions in everyday life involve a choice between exploring options that are currently unknown and exploiting options that are already known to be rewarding. Previous work has suggested that humans solve such “exp...
Prefer a cash slap in your face over credit for halva
We investigated how frequency and amount of punishment affect the decision making of Iranian subjects. In our first experiment, performing a computer-based Persian version of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), our subjects sc...