The Influence Of Subliminal Priming On The Adjustment Direction Of Anchoring Effect

Recent years lots of researches have focused on subliminal priming effect, which includes motor-reaction preparation, mere exposure effect (MEE) and anchoring effect, and so on. We designed three researches to explore the adjustment process of the anchoring effect when the numerical anchoring value is presented subliminally and the self-inhibition process in the anchoring effect.According to the anchoring-adjustment theory, subjects will adjust away by referring to the anchoring value during an estimation task (Simmons, et al., in press). While in the previous studies, researchers put more attention to the effect that provided anchoring values have on estimation tasks, than to the adjustment process. The purpose of this study is to shed some light on the adjustment process of anchoring effect when the anchoring value is presented on subliminal condition. According to the findings of previous studies about the motor-response preparation, when the interval between the disappearance of the priming stimulus and the appearance of the target is long enough, the priming effect will reverse from positive compatibility effect to negative compatibility effect. Our study attempts to explore whether this kind of effect exists in the anchoring effect.In our first study, we used the priming paradigm in motor-response preparation to shows that the two symbols ("<"">") can influence the target response because of its mathematical meaning and the existence of the negative priming effect to prepare for the later studies on the adjustment process of anchoring effect. Our second study didn’t show that the adjustment of anchoring can be influenced by the subliminal priming stimuli when the subjects were asked to estimate the ratio of the actual area. Therefore, we can’t confirm the existence of the negative priming effect in anchoring effect.We improved the target task and increase one time interval condition in the3rd study. Then we found that under the immediate condition, the two symbols can influence the direction of adjustment process of the anchoring effect. Along with the induction of time interval, the subliminal anchoring effect will be turned to the opposite direction, resulting in the opposite anchoring effect. And it will disappear when the time interval becomes long enough. To conclude, our findings can partly support that there is adjustment process during the occurrence of the anchoring effect, which can be influenced by subliminal presented direction symbols ("<",">"). Although negated by some other researches (Wilson et al.,1996), our study found that self-inhibition can also happen in the anchoring effect.