The Influence Of Distrust On Anchoring Effect And The Mechanism

The anchoring effect is one of the biases in the process of decision making and judgment.The so-called anchoring effect refers to the phenomenon that when an individual makes a judgment or decision in an uncertain situation,the estimated value of a certain thing will be affected by a previous irrelevant value.According to the selective accessibility theory of the anchoring effect,the appearance of external anchoring effect is due to the fact that the external anchor automatically activate the knowledge that is consistent with anchor.The dual processing theory of the anchoring effect holds that the external anchoring effect is caused by the automatic heuristic processing which is not affected by hard thinking,while the internal anchoring effect is caused by the conscious analytical processing which is affected by hard thinking.Numerous studies on distrust have found that distrust can automatically activate inconsistent information about a given concept.Therefore,based on the previous studies,this study explored the influence of distrust on anchoring effect through three experiments.Experiment 1 investigated the effects of distrust on external anchoring effect and internal anchoring effect.First,the subjects were placed in a state of trust,distrust or neutrality through trust games,then the subjects were asked to complete the external anchoring problem and the internal anchoring problem.It was found that the external anchoring effect of the subjects in the distrust group was significantly smaller than that of the trust group and the neutral group,but there was no significant difference in the internal anchoring effect of the three groups.In order to explore the mechanism of the influence of distrust on the externalanchoring effect,Experiment 2 investigated whether distrust would lead to the decrease of the external anchoring effect by activating the opposite information of anchor.After the subliminal priming of trust or distrust,the subjects were first asked to complete the comparison problem in the external anchoring problem,then asked to complete the lexical decision task,and finally asked to complete the estimation problem.The results is that the interaction effect between trust state and lexical category was significant.In the trust group,the reaction time of the anchor-consistent word was significantly smaller than the anchor-opposite words,and both of them were significantly smaller than the unrelated word.However,in the distrust group,there was no significant difference between the reaction time of the anchor-consistent word and the anchor-opposite words,and both of them were significantly smaller than the unrelated words.In addition,the reaction time of the anchor-opposite words in the distrust group was significantly lower than that in the trust group,but there was no significant difference between the distrust group and the trust group in the reaction time of the anchor-consistent word.The results of mediation analysis show that the reaction time of the anchor-opposite words partially mediate the the effect of distrust on external anchoring.In order to explore that in the condition of time pressure,whether distrust can still decrease the external anchoring effect by activating the anchor-opposite information.Experiment 3 introduced the factor of time pressure,first,the subjects were placed in a state of trust or distrust through trust games,then the subjects were asked to complete the external anchoring problem under time pressure,and the subjects were asked to complete the lexical decision task at last.The results show that under the time pressure,distrust can still decrease the external anchoring effect,and the interaction effect between time pressure and trust state on the external anchoring effect is not significant.In addition,in the condition of time pressure,the reaction time of the anchor-opposite words also partially mediates the influence of distrust on the external anchoring effect.Based on the results of the above three experiments,the conclusion of this studyis that distrust can decrease the external anchoring effect,but can not decrease the internal anchoring effect.Distrust can decrease the external anchoring effect by activating the of anchor-opposite information,which partially mediate the influence of distrust on the external anchoring effect.In the condition of time pressure,distrust can also decrease the effect of external anchoring by activating the anchor-opposite information.