The Experimental Study Of Self-generated Anchors On The Anchoring Effect

Under the state of uncertainty, people's decision-making often appears a lot of bias, in which anchoring and adjustment heuristic is a common one. This heuristic psychological process includes an anchoring process and an adjustment process. In the judgment process, people will have an "anchoring effect" on the initial information received. Furthermore, people will adjust the evaluation of the whole incident based on this initial information. In fact, anchoring effect is the core of anchoring and adjustment heuristic and different types of anchor value will have different impact on anchoring effect. For instance, anchor value can be classified as high anchors and low anchors according to its high or low value. Anchor value can be also classified as plausible anchors and implausible anchors due to its credibility. Additionally, anchor value can be classified as self-generated anchors and experimenter-provided anchors with respect to its original sources. The thesis mainly adopted a series of experimental simulations in order to investigate the impact of self-generated anchors on the behavior of individuals.Study 1, is to prove the remarkable characteristics of anchoring effect of Chinese people tested in the context of Chinese culture. Because previous studies have largely focused on Europe and the United States, it is of great significance for a kind of cross-cultural psychological research to certificate the existence of anchoring effect based on Chinese culture background. In this thesis, the experiment verified that high anchors generate high evaluation values while low anchors generate low evaluation values. As a result, it proved that anchoring effect has cross-cultural consistency.Study 2, is to observe the impact of the anchor values from different sources on anchoring effect. Anchor value can be classified as self-generated anchors and experimenter-provided anchors with respect to its original sources. The former mainly refers to the anchors generated by people in accordance with their own internal experience; the latter refers to external anchor from the external environment. This study showed that self-generated anchors and experimenter-provided anchors had obvious different impact on anchoring effect in terms of style and strength. Moreover, self-generated anchors had more profound and lasting impact on anchoring effect. The reason why there were such notable differences for individual behavior between two anchors is that anchoring effect would have distinctly different generation mechanisms. Study 3, is to investigate impact of anchoring effect on interpersonal communication, especially for impact of self-generated anchors on the adoption of others' opinions. Previous researches about anchoring effect mainly concentrated on the digital context, while this study is to check whether there is notable anchoring effect in the context of words and to find what impact on the adoption of others' opinions can be done by self-generated anchors. This experiment simulated 12 scenes of interpersonal communication in the experimental design of 2 (intention conditions / inference conditions)×2 (positive / negative information). The result showed that anchoring effect is remarkable as well in the context of words and people accept others' view by adjusting themselves. The subjects were impacted when information were ambiguous interpretation by the background knowledge they have influence. The subjects realize that the speaker's intention may be much more fuzzy with contrast to those who do not have the same background information for readers. Hence, they will try to adjust their self-generated anchor to fill the information differences.The three experiments in this thesis were of gradual procedure in depth, including certification of existence of anchoring effect, investigation of impact of anchor sources on anchoring effect, and effect of individual interpersonal communication by self-generated anchors, from theory research to concrete applications, to illustrate the impact of self-generated anchors on anchoring effect.