Anchoring and Judgment Bias: The Influence of Source Credibility on Making Estimations Under Uncertainty

Abstract:

The current investigation will examine the nature of cognitive processing in the context of decision-making behavior. The focus of this project will center on the judgment biases resulting from utilization of information that is heuristically accessed from available memory. Classic anchoring effects have demonstrated that people tasked with formulating judgments of frequency in uncertain situations will use any available information sampled from memory as a reference for making their estimations. The specific aim of the present experiment will be to assess whether individuals exhibit patterns of behavior consistent with previous findings pertaining to anchoring effects, shown by corrupted subjective judgments, and to what extent those judgments in the form of numerical value estimations are influenced (if at all) by knowledge of the credibility of the source of the would-be anchor. Will subjects disregard information when there is prior knowledge of low source credibility – or – regardless of this knowledge prior to making their numerical value estimation, will anchoring effects emerge in a similar fashion to instances when the credibility of the source is known to be high? That is, will there be a reduced effect of anchoring (or no detectable anchoring) when the source of the information is known to be less as compared to more credible? Will the pattern of results for high and low anchors look the same for both high and low credibility conditions? Implications which follow from our findings will be considered within the context of the well-established availability heuristic, and any notable effects will be explained by accounting for the previously discovered anchoring phenomenon. A two-system framework, arranged in the form of a dual-process model that distinguishes intuition from reasoning, will be used to interpret our results. By reflecting on theoretical explanations of anchoring effects, such as selective accessibility and numerical priming, we hope to reveal the influence of source credibility on the process of making numerical value estimations under uncertainty.