Measures of Anchoring in Estimation Tasks

The chapter focuses on the contribution of conversational processes to the emergence of biases and shortcomings in human judgment, drawing on research in judgment and decision making, attitude measurement, and questionnaire construction. The chapter discusses the logic of conversation in everyday life and in research settings. One of the key assumptions underlying the conduct of conversation holds that all information contributed by participants is relevant to the goal of the ongoing conversation. The chapter illustrates that the biasing effects of questions are mediated by researchers' violations of conversational norms and respondents' erroneous assumption that the questioner is a cooperative communicator. The chapter discusses the formal features of questionnaire construction, such as the specific numeric values presented as part of a rating scale or the range of response alternatives presented as part of a behavioral frequency question, may strongly influence the obtained responses. Experimental studies on the impact of open- and closed-response formats have consistently demonstrated that open- and closed-response formats, yielding considerable differences in the marginal distribution as well as the ranking of items. Unless there is reason to believe that the questioner did not understand the answer already given, the person asked is likely to interpret the second question as a request for new information. =

Abstract Three experiments tested (1) whether anchoring (and insufficient adjustment) will occur during generation of subjective probabilities and (2) whether situation familiarity and performance-contingent incentives will reduce any anchoring effect. A total of 336 business school students either chose between two alternatives based on a preliminary judgment of relatively unlikely (low anchor) or likely (high anchor) event probabilities before generating final probability assessments or were in a no-choice control condition. The results indicate a strong anchoring effect. The anchoring effect is so dominant that increasing situational familiarity did not result in decreased anchoring. Monetary/recognition incentives for accurate judgments did, however, result in significantly less anchoring. Implications are suggested for research on judgment processes and the concept of professional judgment expertise.

“Anchoring” results from insufficient adjustment up or down from an original— often arbitrary—starting value. Six sets of surveys were designed to assess the effects of anchoring on subjective likelihood estimates of a nuclear war. Based on responses from 1600 students, results indicated that: (a) likelihood estimates were strongly susceptible to anchoring; (b) neither likelihood estimates nor the effects of anchoring were significantly influenced by the ease with which respondents could imagine a nuclear war (outcome availability), by instructions to list the most likely path to nuclear war (path availability), or by casting the problem in terms of the avoidance, rather than the occurrence, of nuclear war; (c) the effects of anchoring extended to estimates concerning the efficacy of strategic defenses; and (d) likelihood estimates were affected by anchoring even after correcting for social demand biases. In estimating the likelihood of nuclear war and otherwise attempting to “think the unthinkable”, many students responded in a manner consistent with denial; the paper concludes with a discussion of these individuals.

We define mental contamination as the process whereby a person has an unwanted response because of mental processing that is unconscious or uncontrollable. This type of bias is distinguishable from the failure to know or apply normative rules of inference and can be further divided into the unwanted consequences of automatic processing and source confusion, which is the confusion of 2 or more causes of a response. Mental contamination is difficult to avoid because it results from both fundamental properties of human cognition (e.g., a lack of awareness of mental processes) and faulty lay beliefs about the mind (e.g., incorrect theories about mental biases). People's lay beliefs determine the steps they take (or fail to take) to correct their judgments and thus are an important but neglected source of biased responses. Strategies for avoiding contamination, such as controlling one's exposure to biasing information, are discussed.

The behavioral correlates of human judgment have received little attention from judgment and decision making researchers. One behavioral domain that provides for the study of judgment-behavior relations is task motivation (i.e., the allocation of time and effort to a task). Judgments of contingent relations are primary components of several theories of motivation, including expectancy theories and the theory of behavior in organizations proposed by Naylor, Pritchard, and Ilgen (1980) . The characteristics of heuristic judgment processes are hypothesized to affect contingency judgments and thus behavioral allocations of time and effort. This paper examines the effects of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic upon (a) judgments of future effort and performance and (b) upon actual allocations of time and effort using several types of anchoring information. Results indicate that both irrelevant and relevant information have strong anchoring effects on effort and performance judgments, but do not have concomitant effects on behavior. Implications for the role of judgment in motivation and for the link between judgment and behavior are discussed.

Abstract A preference reversal occurs when revealed preference orderings for the same alternatives differ across response modes. Previous studies have relied primarily on input-output data to infer the presence of particular cognitive mechanisms hypothesized to produce reversals. To obtain more detailed measures of such cognitive mechanisms we used a computer-based experimental methodology to conduct two process tracing experiments, of pricing-choice (Experiment 1) and pricing-rating (Experiment 2) reversals. Results show that in choice (relative to judgment), subjects take much less time, use different patterns of information search, often use strategies that directly compare alternatives (rather than consider them sequentially as in judgments), and allocate their attention differently. In pricing and rating subjects frequently use a strategy of anchoring and adjustment in which the starting point is heavily influenced by those gamble elements most compatible with the response scale. Further, we find that several of these process measures, especially starting points and adjustments, and differential attention to probabilities and payoffs, are strongly related to the frequency of reversals. The degree to which starting points are influenced by the gamble elements that are most compatible with the response scale is particularly important. Results of a third experiment further explore the role of anchors, by showing that a starting point manipulation significantly reduced the rate of pricing-rating reversals. Finally, the results of the three studies are integrated, and implications for theory and future research are discussed.

According to the cooperative principle of conversation that governs social discourse in everyday life, listeners expect speakers to be relevant, truthful, and informative. In studies on judgmental biases, researchers frequently violate this principle by presenting information that is neither informative nor relevant in a communicative context that suggests otherwise. However, subjects have no reason to doubt the relevance of the presented information and try to make sense of it, as they would be expected to do in everyday life. In Experiment 1, the applicability of the cooperative principle was varied to explore the impact of conversational principles on the apparent overreliance of individuals on nondiagnostic person information at the expense of base-rate information. Nondiagnostic person information was presented either as a statement written by a psychologist or as a random sample of information drawn by a computer. As predicted, subjects relied on the personality information rather than on base-rate ...

Is there a difference between believing and merely understanding an idea?Descartes thought so. He considered the acceptance and rejection of an idea to be alternative outcomes of an effortful assessment process that occurs subsequent to the automatic comprehension of that idea. This article examined Spinoza's alternative suggestion that (a) the acceptance of an idea is part of the automatic comprehension of that idea and (b) the rejection of an idea occurs subsequent to, and more effortfully than, its acceptance. In this view, the mental representation of abstract ideas is quite similar to the mental representation of physical objects: People believe in the ideas they comprehend, as quickly and automatically as they believe in the objects they see. Research in social and cognitive psychology suggests that Spinoza's model may be a more accurate account of human belief than is that of Descartes.