Prime Numbers: Anchoring and its Implications for Theories of Behavior Priming
Newell and Shanks use anchoring as a test case for the theory behind behavioural priming. That framework assumes primes have broad effects, influencing a wide range of downstream behaviours, and that the influence is largely automatic. Anchoring had been treated as the strongest illustration of it, since judgments move towards numbers people know to be irrelevant. Reviewing the anchoring literature against those two assumptions, the authors report that it supports neither. Anchoring effects are narrow rather than broad, and they appear when a person is consciously treating the number as information relevant to the judgment. The consequence reaches well beyond anchoring: if the best available case for automatic, wide-reaching priming does not support the framework, the framework is in difficulty, which is roughly what the decade of replication work that followed found.
Newell and Shanks use anchoring as a test case for the theory behind behavioural priming. That framework assumes primes have broad effects, influencing a wide range of downstream behaviours, and that the influence is largely automatic. Anchoring had been treated as the strongest illustration of it, since judgments move towards numbers people know to be irrelevant. Reviewing the anchoring literature against those two assumptions, the authors report that it supports neither. Anchoring effects are narrow rather than broad, and they appear when a person is consciously treating the number as information relevant to the judgment. The consequence reaches well beyond anchoring: if the best available case for automatic, wide-reaching priming does not support the framework, the framework is in difficulty, which is roughly what the decade of replication work that followed found.
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Newell, B. R., & Shanks, D. R. (2014). 'Prime numbers: Anchoring and its implications for theories of behavior priming.' Social Cognition, 32(Supplement), 88-108. doi:10.1521/soco.2014.32.supp.88
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https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2014.32.supp.88
DOI: 10.1521/soco.2014.32.supp.88