Semantic cross-scale numerical anchoring
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2016, Vol 11, Issue 6
Abstract
Anchoring effects are robust, varied and can be consequential. Researchers have provided a variety of alternative explanations for these effects. More recently, it has become apparent that anchoring effects might be produced by a variety of different processes, either acting simultaneously, or else individually in distinct situations. An unresolved issue is whether anchoring, aside from simple numeric priming, can transcend scales. That is, is it necessary that the anchor value and the target judgment are expressed in the same units? Despite some theoretical predictions to the contrary, this paper demonstrates semantic cross-scale anchoring in four experiments. Such effects are important for the direction of future theorising on the causes of anchoring effects and understanding the scope of their consequences in applied domains.
Authors and Affiliations
Adam J. L. Harris and Maarten Speekenbrink
Short-sighted greed? Focusing on the future promotes reputation-based generosity
Long-term thinking and voluntary resource sharing are two distinctive traits of human nature. Across three experiments (N=1,082), I propose a causal connection: Sometimes people are generous because they think about the...
Wording effects in moral judgments
As the study of moral judgments grows, it becomes imperative to compare results across studies in order to create unified theories within the field. These efforts are potentially undermined, however, by variations in wor...
Why recognition is rational: Optimality results on single-variable decision rules
The Recognition Heuristic (Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996; Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002) makes the counter-intuitive prediction that a decision maker utilizing less information may do as well as, or outperform, an idealize...
Evidence for the influence of the mere-exposure effect on voting in the Eurovision Song Contest
The mere exposure, or familiarity, effect is the tendency for people to feel more positive about stimuli to which they have previously been exposed. The Eurovision Song Contest is a two-stage event, in which some contest...
Web-conferencing as a viable method for group decision research
Studying group decision-making is challenging for multiple reasons. An important logistic difficulty is studying a sufficiently large number of groups, each with multiple participants. Assembling groups online could make...