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

ABSTRACT

Early accounts of judgmental anchoring attribute the effect to a deliberate, but insufficient, adjustment process; more recent theories point to automatic, priming-based processes as the underlying cause. In this article we introduce a novel anchor assessment manipulation and a decompositional analysis of the standard anchoring effect to determine the extent to which anchoring is driven by automatic versus deliberate processes. Prior to providing a target estimate, participants indicated whether the target was greater or less than the anchor, or whether the anchor would make a good or bad target estimate. Contrary to predictions of priming-based accounts, the decomposition of the anchoring effect revealed that participants generally provided estimates consistent with their prior assessment; in particular, anchoring was eliminated when participants considered the anchor to be a bad target estimate. These findings challenge the view of anchoring as an inevitable bias of numerical judgment and indicate that people have significant control over how they manage numerical information in judgments under uncertainty. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).