Anchoring And Adjustment Heuristic:One Source Of Misunderstanding

Misunderstanding is inevitable in communication on the basis of a large amount of previous studies about it as for the indeterminacy of natural language and the lack of total intersubjectivity between the speaker and the hearer. Just because of its inevitability, it has been a hot topic and stimulates a large amount of researchers’ interest in exploring its sources for lowering the frequencies of unnecessary consequences owing to misunderstanding.The present study aims at exploring the phenomenon of misunderstanding from the perspective of cognitive psychology and tries to prove that anchoring and adjustment heuristic discovered by Tversky and Kahneman in1974is one of the systematic and intrinsic sources of misunderstanding with the aid of questionnaire-oriented method. Ensuring the validity of the study, we plant anchoring and adjustment heuristic into every item in the questionnaires so that the preference of the subjects to the answers can reflect directly whether they are influenced by the heuristic or not. The results analyzed by SPSS show that people are prone to be affected by anchoring and adjustment heuristic when they interpret ambiguous utterance. If the information anchor adopted by the hearer is different from the speaker’s, misunderstanding will happen. On the contrary, misunderstanding will not happen. So anchoring and adjustment heuristic is one source of misunderstanding.The present study contributes to the theoretical improvement and directs the actual practice for lowering the frequencies of unnecessary consequences owing to misunderstanding. Moreover, it provides a new insight into the exploration of sources of misunderstanding for the following researchers.