Collaborative Research: Anchoring and Insufficient Adjustment in Everyday Judgment

人们的判断常常会受到脑海中第一个信息的极大影响。对他人感知的判断过度地与自己的感知联系在一起（Gilovich & & Savitsky, 1999; Savitsky, Epley, & & Gilovich, 2001; Keysar & & Barr, 2002），对他人个性的印象过度地受到初始性格推断的影响（Gilbert, 2002），对一般知识问题的回答则依赖于加工流早期考虑的不相关信息（Chapman & & Johnson, 2002; Wilson, Brekke, & & Centerbar, 2002）。这些效应，以及许多类似的效应，传统上被解释为从初始锚点或起点调整不足，使用Tversky和Kahneman（1974）所谓的“锚定和调整”启发式。简而言之，人们在各种不确定的情况下做出判断，首先从呈现给他们的信息或快速自动出现在脑海中的信息开始（或锚定），然后不断调整他们的初始印象，直到达到可接受的判断。虽然最初用于解释数字估计，锚定和调整在许多社会判断理论中占有突出地位。最近的证据对“锚定与调整”启发式提出了质疑。特别是，人们已经发现，长期用于研究锚定和调整的实验范式实际上根本不涉及调整。这些结果，伴随着未能找到在这种范式之外的调整过程的确凿证据，导致一些研究人员完全拒绝锚定和调整启发式（Chapman & Johnson, 2002）。由美国国家科学基金会（NSF）资助的研究表明，这一结论还为时过早：当人们在正确的地方观察时，锚定和调整启发式仍然存在，而且很好（Epley & Gilovich, 2001）。这项研究表明，人们以一种连续的方式调整锚，他们自动生成一个已知接近正确答案但需要修补的值。此外，这种“自我产生的”锚的加工似乎在日常生活中很常见和普遍，因此准确理解它们对于更广泛地理解社会判断至关重要。这里提出的研究旨在通过以下方式扩大现有赠款所开展的工作：a)发展跟踪真正锚定和调整操作的新方法；B)更清楚地识别刺激调整和不刺激调整的锚点的确切性质；C)将锚定和调整启发式的范围从一般知识问题扩展到更普遍的社会判断；d)开发克服调整不足的技术。

People's judgments are often inordinately influenced by the first information that comes to mind. Judgments of others' perceptions are unduly tied to one's own (Gilovich & Savitsky, 1999; Savitsky, Epley, & Gilovich, 2001; Keysar & Barr, 2002), impressions of others' personalities overly influenced by initial dispositional inferences (Gilbert, 2002) and answers to general knowledge questions anchored on irrelevant information considered early in the processing stream (Chapman & Johnson, 2002; Wilson, Brekke, & Centerbar, 2002). These effects, and many like them, have traditionally been explained as insufficient adjustment from an initial anchor or starting point, using what Tversky and Kahneman (1974) called the "anchoring and adjustment" heuristic. In short, people make judgments under uncertainty of all kinds by starting with (or anchoring on) information that is presented to their attention or that comes quickly and automatically to mind, and then serially adjusting their initial impression until an acceptable judgment is reached. Although originally used to explain numerical estimates, anchoring and adjustment has figured prominently in numerous theories of social judgment.Recent evidence has cast doubt on the "anchoring and adjustment" heuristic. In particular, it has come to light that the experimental paradigm long used to investigate anchoring and adjustment does not, in fact, involve adjustment at all. These results, accompanied by failures to find conclusive evidence for a process of adjustment outside this paradigm, have led some researchers to reject the anchoring and adjustment heuristic altogether (Chapman & Johnson, 2002). Research conducted with funding from a current NSF grant indicates that this conclusion is premature: The anchoring and adjustment heuristic is alive and well when one looks in the right places (Epley & Gilovich, 2001). This research indicates that people adjust in a serial fashion from anchors they automatically generate themselves as a value known to be close to the right answer but in need of tinkering. It appears, furthermore, that the processing of such "self-generated" anchors is common and pervasive in everyday life, making an accurate understanding of them critical to a broader understanding of social judgment.The studies proposed here are designed to expand the work begun on the existing grant by: a) developing new methodologies for tracking the operation of true anchoring and adjustment; b) more clearly identifying the exact nature of anchors that stimulate adjustment and those that do not; c) expanding the scope of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic beyond questions of general knowledge and into social judgment more generally; and d) developing techniques for overcoming insufficient adjustment.