Perceptual anchoring and adjustment

Abstract

Anchoring and adjustment, a ubiquitous heuristic process in judgment and decision making, has been vastly demonstrated in the numerical domain. We, with the help of four studies, demonstrate the anchoring and adjustment bias in perceptual domains. Our results show that anchoring and adjustment can bias our judgments at relatively low levels of cognition. Additionally, we outline a process by which anchoring and adjustment biases individuals' judgments in perceptual domains. Our results indicate a process wherein individuals search for an answer by testing plausible answers, the search being biased by the anchor question. We show that this movement is dominated by adjustments to adjacent possible responses indicating a search process constrained by selective accessibility. This process account explains the extant data in numerical domains as well—thus providing a way for a potential resolution to the disagreement among different existing process accounts for the anchoring phenomenon.