Subliminal anchoring: The effects of subliminally presented numbers on probability estimates☆
Section snippets
Participants and design
Sixty-two students of Leiden University participated in this experiment (82% female). They were randomly assigned to one of the cells of a 2 (Anchor: low, high) × 2 (Time Pressure: absent, present) between participants factorial design. The main dependent variable was the estimate of the probability of recurrence of an epidemic of pestilence of the lungs in India within a year. This probability was expressed as a percentage.
Procedure
Participants were invited to the laboratory, where they were placed in
Letter combinations
In general, participants did well on the letter combination task. On average each letter combination had been judged accurately (i.e., accurate identification of predominance of capital or lower case letters) by 89% of the participants. The conclusion is that participants were concentrated while working on this task in which the anchor value was presented subliminally.
A 2 (Anchor: low, high) × 2 (Time Pressure: absent, present) ANOVA with as dependent variable the total number of errors made in
Discussion
The results of our study indicate that there is a subliminal anchor effect and that this effect is short-lived. The probability estimate assimilated towards the subliminally presented anchor value in the conditions with time pressure.
In the Introduction section, we described two reasons to expect an anchor effect only in the conditions with time pressure. One reason is that in the conditions with time pressure, the time between the last subliminal presentation of the anchor value and the
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2022, International Journal of Hospitality ManagementEvidence against subliminal anchoring: Two close, highly powered, preregistered, and failed replication attempts
2021, Journal of Experimental Social PsychologyCitation Excerpt :Two issues have to be noted, however. First, unlike Reitsma-van Rooijen et al. (2006), we did not conduct a pilot study to check that participants were unable to perceive the anchor. Although we would not expect differences between Dutch and German people with respect to their perception thresholds, our sample included nonstudents and was older.
The anchoring-bias in groups
2018, Journal of Experimental Social PsychologyCitation Excerpt :Groups are often tasked with making important decisions, after all, “two heads know more than one”, and multiple heads might be able to avoid groups falling prey to influential decision making biases, such as anchoring. Given that anchors are everywhere – from a restaurant name (Critcher & Gilovich, 2008) to subliminal primes (Mussweiler & Englich, 2005; Reitsma-van Rooijen & Dancker, 2006) – the potential impact on group decision-making is large. Indeed, across three studies we found groups can be vulnerable to the anchoring-bias.
The anchor integration model: A descriptive model of anchoring effects
2016, Cognitive PsychologyCitation Excerpt :As such, we included a condition where the anchors were in reference to items different than those of the target judgments. Lastly, given the research that used cognitive load as a means of studying anchoring effects (Blankenship, Wegener, Petty, Detweiler-Bedell, & Macy, 2008; Epley & Gilovich, 2001, 2006; van Rooijen & Daamen, 2006), we included a condition where participants completed the regular anchoring task under cognitive load. We included this range of conditions to test AIM’s ability to model a range of anchoring paradigms.
Anchoring in sequential judgments
2013, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision ProcessesCitation Excerpt :Claims of numeric priming effects remain controversial, however. Many researchers have argued that the mere presence of a number is generally not sufficient to cause anchoring (Brewer & Chapman, 2002; Mussweiler & Strack, 2001) and that these effects may be limited to situations in which participants’ cognitive resources are experimentally constrained (Reitsma-van Rooijen & Daamen, 2006; Wegener, Petty, Blankenship, & Detweiler-Bedell, 2010). Indeed, Brewer and Chapman (2002) failed to replicate many of the findings reported in Wilson et al. (1996).
Elaborating a simpler theory of anchoring
2010, Journal of Consumer Psychology
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We thank Ap Dijksterhuis for valuable advice, and Henk Aarts and Sander Koole for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.