Thomas Mussweiler

Who they are

Mussweiler's research concerns comparison: how people judge things by setting them against a standard, and what follows when the standard is arbitrary. He is associated with the selective accessibility account of anchoring, in which an anchor makes anchor-consistent knowledge easier to retrieve, so a judgment is built from a biased sample of what a person already knows.

This page covers his work rather than his life.

Key papers

Englich, B., Mussweiler, T., & Strack, F. (2006). "Playing dice with criminal sentences." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32(2), 188-200.* Experienced legal professionals anchored their sentencing decisions on a demand that was irrelevant, explicitly random, or generated by their own throw of the dice. The paper states that expertise and experience did not reduce the effect.

Mussweiler, T., Strack, F., & Pfeiffer, T. (2000). 'Overcoming the inevitable anchoring effect.' Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26(9), 1142-1150.* Two studies in which generating reasons why the anchor is inappropriate reduced anchoring, derived directly from the selective accessibility model: if the effect works by making anchor-consistent knowledge accessible, deliberately raising the accessibility of inconsistent knowledge should counteract it.

Key ideas

The pairing is what makes the work useful. One paper shows the effect surviving professional training in the task, which removes the comfortable assumption that experts are immune. The other provides the only defence with direct experimental support, and it is specific: not vigilance, but constructing the argument against the number.

The mechanism he proposed has not gone unchallenged. A test the literature treats as a signature of selective accessibility did not produce the expected evidence across five experiments reported by Harris, Blower and Rodgers, which this publication records alongside the rest.

Concepts on this site

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