Considering The Impossible: Explaining The Effects of Implausible Anchors

Research on judgmental anchoring - the assimilation of a numeric estimate towards a previously considered standard - has demonstrated that implausible anchors produce large effects. We propose an insufficient adjustment plus selective accessibility account for these effects. Specifically, judges may adjust from an implausible anchor until a plausible value for the target is reached and may then test the hypothesis that the target's extension is similar to this value. If this is indeed the case, then differentially extreme implausible anchors should produce similar absolute estimates, because adjustment from any implausible anchor should terminate at the same value. Results of two studies are consistent with this prediction. They show that implausible anchors that differ extremely produce similar absolute estimates. The implications of these findings for alternative models of anchoring are discussed.