When "bad" is good: How evaluative judgments eliminate the standard anchoring effect

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Judgment and Decision Making

Background:

• Judgmental anchoring is traditionally attributed to insufficient adjustment or automatic priming processes.
• Recent theories emphasize automatic, priming-based mechanisms underlying the anchoring effect.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the extent to which anchoring is driven by automatic versus deliberate processes.
• To introduce a novel anchor assessment manipulation and a decompositional analysis of the standard anchoring effect.

Main Methods:

• Participants provided a target estimate after indicating the relationship between the target and anchor, or the anchor's quality as an estimate.
• A decompositional analysis was used to analyze the standard anchoring effect.

Main Results:

• Contrary to priming-based predictions, participants' estimates were consistent with their prior assessment of the anchor.
• Anchoring was eliminated when participants deemed the anchor a bad target estimate.

Conclusions:

• Findings challenge the view of anchoring as an inevitable bias.
• Individuals possess significant control over managing numerical information in uncertain judgments.