Original Research: The Anchoring Effect in A Range of Plausible Anchors

In this series on Original Research, I will be sharing about my findings from some of the mini-projects that I have carried out on my own.

The anchoring effect is a systematic cognitive bias committed by individuals, when they rely too heavily on an initial piece of information for making a subsequent judgment. This is especially pronounced when the individual does not have much knowledge in the subject matter that he/she is assessing, and end up getting influenced by any information that comes before the judgment.

One of the most popular examples is by Strack & Mussweiler (1997), who conducted a study asking participants to guess the age of Mahatma Gandhi when he died. But before asking for their estimates, the researchers exposed one group to a low anchor (“Did Mahatma Gandhi died before or after the age of 9 years old?”), and exposed another group to a high anchor (“Did Mahatma Gandhi died before or after the age of 140 years old?”). While it was impossible for both anchors to be the correct answer, they nonetheless had an effect on the participants, as the mean estimate from the low anchor group was 50, while the mean estimate from the high anchor group was 67.