Birte Englich

Who they are

Englich's research concerns judgment in applied settings, particularly legal decision-making, and the conditions under which irrelevant information influences experts who believe themselves immune to it. Her work with Thomas Mussweiler and Fritz Strack put anchoring into a professional context where the stakes are real.

This page covers her work rather than her life.

Key papers

Englich, B., Mussweiler, T., & Strack, F. (2006). "Playing dice with criminal sentences: The influence of irrelevant anchors on experts’ judicial decision making." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32(2), 188-200.* Three studies. Legal experts anchored on a sentencing demand when it came from an irrelevant source, when they were told it had been randomly determined, and when they generated it themselves by throwing dice. The paper reports that expertise and experience did not reduce the effect.

Englich, B., & Soder, K. (2009). 'Moody experts: How mood and expertise influence judgmental anchoring.' Judgment and Decision Making, 4(1), 41-50.* A test of whether mood moderates anchoring, on the reasoning that because anchoring results from elaborate knowledge activation, more thorough processing should produce more anchoring rather than less.

Key ideas

The sentencing work is the strongest available answer to the objection that anchoring is a laboratory curiosity performed on students. The participants were professionals, the task was the one they were trained for, and the anchor was visibly meaningless.

The second paper is worth knowing for its counterintuitive prediction. If anchoring works by activating knowledge consistent with the anchor, then the careful, deliberative state that protects people from other biases should make anchoring worse.

Concepts on this site

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