The limits of anchoring.

@article{Chapman1994TheLO,
  title={The limits of anchoring.},
  author={Gretchen B. Chapman and Eric J. Johnson},
  journal={Journal of Behavioral Decision Making},
  year={1994},
  volume={7},
  pages={223-242}
}
Anchoring and adjustment is a pervasive bias in which decision makers are influenced by random or uninformative numbers or starting points. As a means of understanding this effect, we explore two limits on anchoring. In Experiments 1 and 2, implausibly extreme anchors had a proportionally smaller effect than anchors close to the expected value of the lotteries evaluated. In Experiments 2 and 3, anchoring occurred only if the anchor and preference judgment were expressed on the same scale… 
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372 Citations
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372 Citations

The fragile basic anchoring effect

The anchoring bias, the effect of uninformative anchor numbers on judgments, is a robust finding. In experiments yielding the anchoring bias, typically participants are explicitly asked to compare…

Anchoring, Activation, and the Construction of Values.

  • ChapmanJohnson
  • Psychology
    Organizational behavior and human decision processes
  • 1999
This work suggests that anchors affect judgments by increasing the availability and construction of features that the anchor and target hold in common and reducing the availability of features of the target that differ from the anchor.

A new look at anchoring effects: basic anchoring and its antecedents.

Five studies supported the hypothesis that basic anchoring effects can occur, whereby uninformative numerical anchors influence a judgment even when people are not asked to compare this number to the target value.

Do anchors hold for real? Anchoring effect and hypothetical bias in declared WTP

In two field experiments the authors elicit willingness to pay for a mascara, systematically manipulating incentives to provide the true valuation (hypothetical vs. real) and anchors (high vs. low or…

Fooled by facts: quantifying anchoring bias through a large-scale experiment

The comparison of the anchoring stimuli and respective responses across different tasks reveals a positive, yet complex relationship between the anchors and the bias in participants' predictions of the outcomes of events in the future.

The robustness of the anchoring effect in valuation tasks

I examined the robustness of the anchoring effect with respect to the method of valuation, type of anchor and the availability of information about the presented product. In four different laboratory…

Implications of Attitude Change Theories for Numerical Anchoring: Anchor Plausibility and the Limits of Anchor Effectiveness

Abstract Effects of extreme versus moderate numerical anchors are investigated. Similar to past results in attitude change, three separate data collections show that extreme anchors can have less…

Variations on anchoring: Sequential anchoring revisited

The anchoring effect, the assimilation of judgment toward a previously considered value, has been shown using various experimental paradigms. We used several variations of the sequential anchoring…

Hindsight bias as a function of anchor distance and anchor plausibility

Varying anchor distance showed that anchor plausibility decreased with increasing anchor distance following a non-linear monotone function, and that size of hindsight bias initially increased with increasing anchored distance but, from a certain distance, started to decrease.

Putting Adjustment Back in the Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic: Differential Processing of Self-Generated and Experimenter-Provided Anchors

Evidence is presented that insufficient adjustment produces anchoring effects when the anchors are self-generated, and it is suggested it is time to reintroduce anchoring and adjustment as an explanation for some judgments under uncertainty.
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References

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