The Anchoring Effect in Study Time Allocation: Labor-in-Vain versus Labor-and-Gain

How to allocate study time is an important decision-making problem learners face. Research on this problem can help improve the learning performance of learners and provide guidance for teaching activities. This research aimed to explore the potential of anchors (prior information that may influence individual decision-making and judgment under uncertainty) as clues for study time allocation and examine the effectiveness of study time allocation under the influence of anchors. Sixty-two Chinese university students (M_age = 21.21, SD = 1.74; 44 females) studied 20 word pairs under self-paced learning instructions. These instructions either set a high anchor (i.e., the typical participant spent 15 s learning each pair) or a low anchor (i.e., the typical participant spent 5 s learning each pair) for study time. After a brief distraction phase, participants took a cued recall test. The results showed that the higher the anchor value, the longer the corresponding study time, and the longer the study time, the better the memory performance. These results reveal that there is both an anchoring effect and a labor-and-gain effect in self-paced study time allocation. This study extends the range of observable anchoring effects and provides important information on allocating study time effectively.