Salvaging the Anchoring and Adjusting Heuristic

道琼斯指数明年可能的价格是多少？ 病人还能活多久？ 在一场迫在眉睫的军事行动中，可能会有多少人丧生？ 决策者每天都要面对这样的问题。 拟议中的研究旨在理解并最终改善做出这种判断的精确心理过程。 这种判断通常是通过从某个初始起点进行调整而做出的。 道琼斯指数目前为10,500点，因此人们可能会估计明年将达到11,000点。 最后一个有同样症状的病人活了6个月，所以估计生存时间为一年。 心理学家、经济学家和市场营销学者在过去25年里对这种“锚定和调整”过程进行了研究，发现一个人的最终判断往往过于接近最初的价值，即，初始值作为一个“锚锚”，使最终的判断产生偏差。2本研究试图建立在锚定和调整过程的现有知识的基础上，通过指出（经验证明）当前文献中的一个重要误解。 这些实验旨在表明，像上面这些现实世界的问题所引发的心理过程与用于研究锚定和调整的标准范式中所引发的心理过程有很大的不同。 像上面这些现实世界的问题涉及从初始值的显式调整;标准锚定范式涉及锚一致性信息的简单启动。 通过将该领域引导到现实世界背景下锚定效应的真正来源，拟议的研究有望为可用于提高重要现实世界预测准确性的策略指明方向。

What is the likely price of the Dow next year? How long can the patient expect to live? How many lives are likely to be lost in a looming military campaign? Questions such as these confront decision makers every day. The proposed research seeks to understand, and ultimately improve, the precise psychological processes by which such judgments are made. Often such judgments are made by adjusting from some initial starting point. The Dow is at 10,500 right now, so one might estimate it will be at 11,000 next year. The last patient with the same symptoms lived for 6 months, so one might estimate a survival time of one year. Psychologists, economists, and marketing scholars have investigated such "anchoring and adjustment" processes during the past twenty-five years and have found that a person's ultimate judgment tends to be too close to the initial value-i.e., the initial value serves as an "anchor" that biases the ultimate judgment.The present research seeks to build on existing knowledge of anchoring and adjustment processes by pointing out (with empirical justification) an important misunderstanding in the current literature. The proposed experiments are designed to show that the psychological processes invoked by real-world problems like those above are quite different from those invoked in the standard paradigms used to investigate anchoring and adjustment. Real-world problems like those above involve explicit adjustment from the initial value; the standard anchoring paradigm involves simple priming of anchor-consistent information. By directing the field to the true source of anchoring effects in real-world contexts, the proposed research promises to point the way to strategies that can be used to improve the accuracy of important real-world forecasts.