Ben Newell

Ben Newell

Cognitive psychologist at UNSW Sydney, working on judgment and decision-making. With David Shanks he reviewed the anchoring literature to test whether stray numbers act on behaviour broadly and automatically, and concluded that they do not.

Who they are

Newell's research concerns how people make decisions from experience and from description, and how much of that process runs outside awareness. His work has repeatedly taken claims about unconscious influence and asked what the evidence actually supports, which is the context for the anchoring review.

This page covers his work rather than his life.

Key papers

Newell, B. R., & Shanks, D. R. (2014). 'Prime numbers: Anchoring and its implications for theories of behavior priming.' Social Cognition, 32(Supplement), 88-108.* A selective review using anchoring as a test case for the theoretical framework behind behavioural priming, in which primes are assumed to have broad effects on a wide range of downstream behaviours, largely automatically. The authors report that the anchoring literature supports neither assumption: anchoring effects are narrow, and they depend on the person consciously treating the number as relevant.

Key ideas

The paper matters because anchoring had been used as the strongest single piece of evidence for automatic, wide-reaching priming effects. If the best case does not support the framework, the framework is in trouble, which is roughly what the following decade of replication work found.

For a reader interested in shopping rather than theory, the practical translation is that a number has to be admissible before it does anything. Glimpsed numbers are not doing the work that popular accounts attribute to them.

Concepts on this site

Sources

  1. Newell, B. R., & Shanks, D. R. (2014). doi:10.1521/soco.2014.32.supp.88
  2. Affiliation from the public author record.