Moody experts — How mood and expertise influence judgmental anchoring

Anchoring effects, the assimilation of numerical estimates to previously considered standards, are highly robust. Two studies examined whether mood and expertise jointly moderate the magnitude of anchoring. Previous research has demonstrated that happy mood induces judges to process information in a less thorough manner than sad mood, which means that happy judges tend to be more susceptible to unwanted influences. However, this may not be true for anchoring effects. Because anchoring results from an elaborate process of selective knowledge activation, more thorough processing should lead to more anchoring; as a result, sad judges should show stronger anchoring effects than happy judges and happy judges may even remain uninfluenced by the given anchors. Because information processing of experts may be relatively independent of their mood, however, mood may influence anchoring only in non-experts. Results of two studies on legal decision-making (Study 1) and numeric estimates (Study 2) are consistent with these expectations. These findings suggest that, at least for non-experts, positive mood may eliminate the otherwise robust anchoring effect.

[1]  Timothy D. Wilson,et al.  A new look at anchoring effects: basic anchoring and its antecedents. , 1996, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[2]  Victor Ottati,et al.  Effects on mood during exposure to target information on subsequently reported judgments: An on-line model of misattribution and correction. , 1996 .

[3]  N. Schwarz.  Warmer and More Social: Recent Developments in Cognitive Social Psychology , 1998 .

[4]  Thomas Mussweiler,et al.  The Last Word in Court—A Hidden Disadvantage for the Defense , 2005, Law and human behavior.

[5]  Charles J. Brainerd,et al.  Emerging Perspectives on Judgment and Decision Research: Memory, Development, and Rationality: An Integrative Theory of Judgment and Decision Making , 2003 .

[6]  N. Schwarz.  Situated cognition and the wisdom in feelings: Cognitive tuning. , 2002 .

[7]  Brian H. Bornstein,et al.  The More You Ask For, the More You Get: Anchoring in Personal Injury Verdicts , 1996 .

[8]  F. Strack,et al.  The Semantics of Anchoring , 2001 .

[9]  Leila T. Worth,et al.  Processing deficits and the mediation of positive affect in persuasion. , 1989, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[10]  J. Haidt.  The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. , 2001, Psychological review.

[11]  A. Isen,et al.  Positive Affect Facilitates Integration of Information and Decreases Anchoring in Reasoning among Physicians , 1997 .

[12]  V. Ottati,et al.  Effects of mood during exposure to target information on subsequently reported judgments: an on-line model of misattribution and correction. , 1996, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[13]  Geben Sie ihm doch einfach fünf Jahre , 2005 .

[14]  Retribution and Revenge , 2000 .

[15]  F. Strack,et al.  Playing Dice With Criminal Sentences: The Influence of Irrelevant Anchors on Experts’ Judicial Decision Making , 2006, Personality & social psychology bulletin.

[16]  F. Strack,et al.  The use of category and exemplar knowledge in the solution of anchoring tasks. , 2000, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[17]  Eric J. Johnson,et al.  The limits of anchoring. , 1994 .

[18]  Eric J. Johnson,et al.  Anchoring, Activation, and the Construction of Values. , 1999, Organizational behavior and human decision processes.

[19]  V. Reyna,et al.  Physician decision making and cardiac risk: effects of knowledge, risk perception, risk tolerance, and fuzzy processing. , 2006, Journal of experimental psychology. Applied.

[20]  Thomas Mussweiler,et al.  Sentencing Under Uncertainty: Anchoring Effects in the Courtroom1 , 2001 .

[21]  F. Strack,et al.  Mood and Persuasion , 1990 .

[22]  G. Clore,et al.  Mood, misattribution, and judgments of well-being: Informative and directive functions of affective states. , 1983 .

[23]  G. Bodenhausen,et al.  Sadness and Susceptibility to Judgmental Bias: The Case of Anchoring , 2000, Psychological science.

[24]  E. Higgins,et al.  Handbook of motivation and cognition : foundations of social behavior , 1991 .

[25]  G. Chapman,et al.  The fragile basic anchoring effect , 2002 .

[26]  H. Bless,et al.  Mood and the reliance on the ease of retrieval heuristic. , 2003, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[27]  N. Epley,et al.  Putting Adjustment Back in the Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic: Differential Processing of Self-Generated and Experimenter-Provided Anchors , 2001, Psychological science.

[28]  F. Strack,et al.  Explaining the Enigmatic Anchoring Effect: Mechanisms of Selective Accessibility , 1997 .

[29]  G. Bodenhausen,et al.  Negative affect and social judgment: The differential impact of anger and sadness , 1994 .

[30]  Thomas Mussweiler,et al.  Overcoming the Inevitable Anchoring Effect: Considering the Opposite Compensates for Selective Accessibility , 2000 .

[31]  Nicholas Epley,et al.  A Tale of Tuned Decks? Anchoring as Accessibility and Anchoring as Adjustment , 2008 .

[32]  Thomas Mussweiler,et al.  Numeric Judgments under Uncertainty: The Role of Knowledge in Anchoring , 2000 .

[33]  When knowledge matters—differential effects of available knowledge in standard and basic anchoring tasks , 2008 .

[34]  F. Strack,et al.  Happiness and reminiscing: The role of time perspective, affect, and mode of thinking. , 1985, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

[35]  Thomas Mussweiler,et al.  Subliminal anchoring: Judgmental consequences and underlying mechanisms , 2005 .

[36]  Eric J. Johnson,et al.  Incorporating the Irrelevant: Anchors in Judgments of Belief and Value , 2002 .

[37]  A. Galinsky,et al.  First offers as anchors: the role of perspective-taking and negotiator focus. , 2001, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[38]  G. Bodenhausen,et al.  Happiness and stereotypic thinking in social judgment. , 1994 .

[39]  Diane M. Ste-Marie,et al.  Expert-novice differences in gymnastic judging : An information-processing perspective , 1999 .

[40]  «Give him five years!» - Influences of Partisan Hecklers on Judges' Sentencing Decisions , 2005 .

[41]  I. Ritov,et al.  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes Anchoring in Simulated Competitive Market Negotiation , 2022 .

[42]  G. Clore,et al.  Feelings and phenomenal experiences , 1996 .

[43]  A. Tversky,et al.  Affect, Generalization, and the Perception of Risk. , 1983 .

[44]  Thomas Mussweiler,et al.  Hypothesis-consistent testing and semantic priming in the anchoring paradigm: A selective accessibility model. , 1999 .

[45]  Barbara Means,et al.  The influence of positive affect on decision-making strategy. , 1983 .

[46]  Kimberly K. Moreno,et al.  The impact of affective information on the professional judgments of more experienced and less experienced auditors , 2002 .

[47]  A. Tversky,et al.  Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases , 1974, Science.