Anchoring in a Social Context: How the Possibility of Being Misinformed by Others Impacts One's Judgment

Building on research about naïve theories of biases, we propose that people are more likely to engage in critical thinking when assessing others’ reasoning. Hence, anchoring effects should be reduced when anchor values are presented as others’ estimates and people perceive others as less knowledgeable (i.e., more prone to biases) than themselves. Three experiments tested this hypothesis by presenting the same anchors as other participants’ answers or without a specified source. This source manipulation was combined with explicit forewarnings about the anchoring effect, which have been shown to trigger debiasing efforts. In support of our hypothesis, results showed that anchors provided by a social source effectively reduced the anchoring effect and did so in a more reliable way than forewarnings. Furthermore, the response-time analysis in two of the experiments suggests that such attenuation was the result of deliberate adjustment.