The Anchoring-and-Adjustment Heuristic: Why the Adjustments Are Insufficient
Abstract
One way to make judgments under uncertainty is to anchor on information that comes to mind and adjust until a plausible estimate is reached. This anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic is assumed to underlie many intuitive judgments, and insufficient adjustment is commonly invoked to explain judgmental biases. However, despite extensive research on anchoring effects, evidence for adjustment-based anchoring biases has only recently been provided, and the causes of insufficient adjustment remain unclear. This research was designed to identify the origins of insufficient adjustment. The results of two sets of experiments indicate that adjustments from self-generated anchor values tend to be insufficient because they terminate once a plausible value is reached (Studies 1a and 1b) unless one is able and willing to search for a more accurate estimate (Studies 2a-2c).
Get full access to this article
View all access and purchase options for this article.
REFERENCES
Cacioppo J.T., Petty R.E., Feinstein J.A., Jarvis B.G. (1996). Dispositional differences in cognitive motivation: The life and times of individuals varying in need for cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 197–253.
Cacioppo J.T., Petty R.E., Kao C.F. (1984). The efficient assessment of need for cognition. Journal of Personality Assessment, 48, 306–307.
Chapman G.B., Johnson E.J. (2002). Incorporating the irrelevant: Anchors in judgments of belief and value. In Gilovich T., Griffin D., Kahneman D. (Eds.), Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment (pp. 120–138). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Chun W.Y., Spiegel S., Kruglanski A.W. (2002). Assimilative behavior identification can also be resource dependent: The unimodel perspective on personal-attribution phases. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 542–555.
Epley N. (2004). A tale of Tuned Decks? Anchoring as adjustment and anchoring as activation. In Koehler D.J., Harvey N. (Eds.), The Blackwell handbook of judgment and decision making (pp. 240–256). Oxford, England: Blackwell.
Epley N., Gilovich T. (2001). Putting adjustment back in the anchoring and adjustment heuristic: Differential processing of self-generated and experimenter-provided anchors. Psychological Science, 12, 391–396.
Epley N., Gilovich T. (2004). Are adjustments insufficient? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 447–460.
Epley N., Gilovich T. (2005). When effortful thinking influences judgmental anchoring: Differential effects of forewarning and incentives on self-generated and externally-provided anchors. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 18, 199–212.
Epley N., Keysar B., Van Boven L., Gilovich T. (2004). Perspective taking as egocentric anchoring and adjustment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 327–339.
Gilbert D.T. (2002). Inferential correction. In Gilovich T., Griffin D., Kahneman D. (Eds.), Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment (pp. 167–184). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Gilbert D.T., Gill M.J. (2000). The momentary realist. Psychological Science, 11, 394–398.
Jacowitz K.E., Kahneman D. (1995). Measures of anchoring in estimation tasks. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 1161–1167.
Klayman J., Ha Y.W. (1987). Confirmation, disconfirmation, and information in hypotheses testing. Psychological Review, 94, 211–228.
Kruger J. (1999). Lake Wobegon be gone! The “below-average effect” and the egocentric nature of comparative ability judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 221–232.
LeBoeuf R.A., Shafir E. (in press). The long and short of it: Physical anchoring effects. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.
Miller G.A., Galanter E., Pribram K.H. (1960). Plans and the structure of behavior. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Mussweiler T., Strack F. (1999a). Comparing is believing: A selective accessibility model of judgmental anchoring. In Stroebe W., Hewstone M. (Eds.), European review of social psychology (Vol. 10, pp. 135–167). Chichester, England: Wiley.
Mussweiler T., Strack F. (1999b). Hypothesis-consistent testing and semantic priming in the anchoring paradigm: A selective accessibility model. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 136–164.
Mussweiler T., Strack F. (2000). The use of category and exemplar knowledge in the solution of anchoring tasks. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 1038–1052.
Mussweiler T., Strack F. (2001a). “Considering the impossible”: Explaining the effects of implausible anchors. Social Cognition, 19, 145–160.
Mussweiler T., Strack F. (2001b). The semantics of anchoring. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 86, 234–255.
Mussweiler T., Strack F. (2004). The Euro in the common European market: A single currency increases the comparability of prices. Journal of Economic Psychology, 25, 557–563.
Nisbett R.E., Wilson T.D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84, 231–259.
Parducci A. (1974). Contextual effects: A range frequency analysis. In Carterette E.C., Friedman M.P. (Eds.), Handbook of perception (Vol. 2, pp. 128–141). New York: Academic Press.
Pelham B.W., Sumarta T.T., Myaskovsky L. (1994). The easy path from many to much: The numerosity heuristic. Cognitive Psychology, 26, 103–133.
Plous S. (1989). Thinking the unthinkable: The effect of anchoring on likelihood estimates of nuclear war. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 19, 67–91.
Quattrone G.A. (1982). Overattribution and unit formation: When behavior engulfs the person. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42, 593–607.
Quattrone G.A., Lawrence C.P., Finkel S.E., Andrus D.C. (1981). Explorations in anchoring: The effects of prior range, anchor extremity, and suggestive hints. Unpublished manuscript, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
Schkade D.A., Johnson E.J. (1989). Cognitive processes in preference reversals. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 44, 203–231.
Strack F., Mussweiler T. (1997). Explaining the enigmatic anchoring effect: Mechanisms of selective accessibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 437–446.
Trope Y., Gaunt R. (2000). Processing alternative explanations of behavior: Correction or integration? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 344–354.
Tversky A., Kahneman D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124–1130.
Wegener D.T., Petty R.E. (1995). Flexible correction processes in social judgment: The role of naïve theories in corrections for perceived bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 36–51.
Wells G.L., Petty R.E. (1980). The effects of overt head movements on persuasion: Compatibility and incompatibility of responses. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 1, 219–230.
Wilson T.D., Houston C., Etling K.M., Brekke N. (1996). A new look at anchoring effects: Basic anchoring and its antecedents. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 4, 387–402.
Wright W.F., Anderson U. (1989). Effects of situation familiarity and financial incentives on use of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic for probability assessment. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 44, 68–82.
Cite article
Cite article
Cite article
OR
Download to reference manager
If you have citation software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice
Information, rights and permissions
Information
Published In
Article first published: April 2006
Issue published: April 2006
PubMed: 16623688
Authors
Metrics and citations
Metrics
Article usage*
Total views and downloads: 17416
*Article usage tracking started in December 2016
Altmetric
See the impact this article is making through the number of times it’s been read, and the Altmetric Score.
Learn more about the Altmetric Scores
Articles citing this one
Receive email alerts when this article is cited
Web of Science: 530 view articles Opens in new tab
Crossref: 602
- The effort heuristic in little-c evaluations: An effort-derogation effect
- Willingness to work as a predictor of human-agent team success
- Time’s Up? How Temporal Maps of Climate Change Shape Climate Action
- Disclosing sample bias fails to fully correct judgments of partisan extremity
- Testing the reliability of anchoring susceptibility scores
- Psychological effects of horizontal price display: how left-right location shapes reference price and perceived quality
- Behavioural shortcomings to avoid in asset valuation using comparable method – insights from a survey experiment
- Partisan Bias in Political Judgment
- Blaming the Strawless Brickmaker: Constraint Neglect in Judging Decision Quality
- The effects of process transparency and prior evaluation results on subjective evaluation decisions
- View More
Figures and tables
Figures & Media
Tables
View Options
Access options
If you have access to journal content via a personal subscription, university, library, employer or society, select from the options below:
I am signed in as:
View my profileSign out
I can access personal subscriptions, purchases, paired institutional access and free tools such as favourite journals, email alerts and saved searches.
loading institutional access options
APS members can access this journal content using society membership credentials.
APS members can access this journal content using society membership credentials.
Alternatively, view purchase options below:
Purchase 24 hour online access to view and download content.
Access journal content via a DeepDyve subscription or find out more about this option.
