What Stimuli Are Necessary for Anchoring Effects to Occur?

Yutaro Onuki; Hidehito Honda; Kazuhiro Ueda

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.602372

What Stimuli Are Necessary for Anchoring Effects to Occur?

Front Psychol. 2021 Mar 12:12:602372. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.602372. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Yutaro Onuki^{1

2}, Hidehito Honda³, Kazuhiro Ueda¹

Affiliations

¹ Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
² Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Tokyo, Japan.
³ Faculty of Psychology, Otemon Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan.

Abstract

The anchoring effect is a form of cognitive bias in which exposure to some piece of information affects its subsequent numerical estimation. Previous studies have discussed which stimuli, such as numbers or semantic priming stimuli, are most likely to induce anchoring effects. However, it has not been determined whether anchoring effects will occur when a number is presented alone or when the semantic priming stimuli have an equivalent dimension between a target and the stimuli without a number. We conducted five experimental studies (N = 493) using stimuli to induce anchoring effects. We found that anchoring effects did not occur when a number was presented alone or when phrases to induce semantic priming were used without presenting a number. These results indicate that both numerical and semantic priming stimuli must be presented for anchoring effects to occur. Our findings represent a substantial contribution to the literature on anchoring effects by offering insights into how these effects are generated.

Keywords: anchoring effect; judgment; numerical priming; scale distortion; semantic priming.