Lukas Röseler

Who they are

Röseler's work sits at the intersection of anchoring research and research methods. Rather than running another anchoring experiment, he and his colleagues gathered the existing ones into a single open dataset so that questions about moderators, paradigms and effect sizes could be answered across the literature instead of study by study.

This page covers his work rather than his life.

Key papers

Röseler, L., Weber, L., Helgerth, K., et al. (2022). 'The Open Anchoring Quest Dataset: Anchored estimates from 96 studies on anchoring effects.' Journal of Open Psychology Data.* All available data from anchoring studies with at least two anchors, standardised to one estimate per row and coded for a wide range of variables.

Röseler, L., Weber, L., Helgerth, K., et al. (2024). 'Measurements of susceptibility to anchoring are unreliable.' Meta-Psychology.* A decade of research has related anchoring susceptibility to personality traits including intelligence, the Big Five and narcissism, with contradictory findings. This paper argues the inconsistency is grounded in imprecise measurement, and that reliability estimates for susceptibility scores have rarely been reported.

Key ideas

The practical consequence for a reader is blunt: there is no valid test that tells you whether you are personally resistant to anchoring, and the confident feeling that you are is not evidence.

The methodological consequence is larger. A field can accumulate ten years of published findings about who is susceptible to an effect without ever establishing that the susceptibility score means anything, and the contradictions in that literature are the symptom rather than the disease.

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