Explaining the enigmatic anchoring effect: Mechanisms of selective accessibility

Abstract

Results of 3 studies support the notion that anchoring is a special case of semantic priming; specifically, information that is activated to solve a comparative anchoring task will subsequently be more accessible when participants make absolute judgments. By using the logic of priming research, in Study 1 the authors showed that the strength of the anchor effect depends on the applicability of activated information. Study 2 revealed a contrast effect when the activated information was not representative for the absolute judgment and the targets of the 2 judgment tasks were sufficiently different. Study 3 demonstrated that generating absolute judgments requires more time when comparative judgments include an implausible anchor and can therefore be made without relevant target information that would otherwise be accessible. In current psychological research, few phenomena are easier to demonstrate and harder to explain than the so-called anchoring effect, a biased estimate toward an arbitrary value considered by judges before making a numerical estimate This finding, that an absolute numerical judgment may be assimilated toward the standard of a preceding comparative The present research was supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. We thank Rudiger Pohl for providing methodological advice and calibration data. We are grateful to Marti Hope Gonzales for valuable suggestions concerning this article and to Klau