Neutral Anchoring Experiment

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1. Background and description

Anchoring heuristic is using the first piece of information, which is the known case, as basis when making decisions. It is one of the most investigated behavioral biases following the study from Tversky and Kahnemann. The classic study of anchoring calculations is the study by Tversky and Kahnemann, in which most participates gave a lower estimate of 1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8 than that of 8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1. These findings serve as an illustration of how neutral anchor will affect the calculated outcome.

Anchoring effects are often based on individual settings, in which the anchor itself is derived from an individual condition such as known price of similar things. However, its social dimension has been neglected to date
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The social anchor includes feedback from other participants and learning effects. It is hoped that through the research, we can compare the influence of neutral anchor and social anchor in making decisions, with an aim to test the hypothesis that social context has a clear influence on anchoring. This paper is organized as follows. Session 2 is the hypothesis of the experiment, session 3 is the experimental design, and session 4 is the expected result, followed by the key difference in methods and methodology …show more content…
People tend to seek confirmation from the peers in the group, thus the conformity pressure will lead to more bias towards social anchors. We are interested in the magnitude of the anchoring effects of both social anchors than neutral anchor, thus compare which type of anchor shows a more decisive impact.

Hypothesis 3:
Individuals are more inclined to anchoring effects when given higher complex task. When individuals face with complex estimating task, they tend to rely more on anchoring heuristics because the heavy cognitive loads hinder them from estimating the more accurate answer. People tend to choose information that is available as reference.

3. New methods and experimental design

The experiment is based on the numeric anchoring study (Meub et al, 2013). Same as the previous research, participants are given an estimation task of mathematical equation, in which participants have to predict the outcome of values. There are also two treatments, which involve the simple and complex version. There are modifications from the previous research, in which participants have to undergo two sets of experiments that both involved more procedures. The two experiments comprise of control and anchor