Moody experts --- How mood and expertise influence judgmental anchoring

Birte Englich and Kirsten Soder

Judgment and Decision Making, 2009, vol. 4, issue 1, pages 41-50

Abstract: Anchoring effects, the assimilation of numerical estimates to previously considered standards, are highly robust. Two studies examined whether mood and expertise jointly moderate the magnitude of anchoring. Previous research has demonstrated that happy mood induces judges to process information in a less thorough manner than sad mood, which means that happy judges tend to be more susceptible to unwanted influences. However, this may not be true for anchoring effects. Because anchoring results from an elaborate process of selective knowledge activation, more thorough processing should lead to more anchoring; as a result, sad judges should show stronger anchoring effects than happy judges and happy judges may even remain uninfluenced by the given anchors. Because information processing of experts may be relatively independent of their mood, however, mood may influence anchoring only in non-experts. Results of two studies on legal decision-making (Study 1) and numeric estimates (Study 2) are consistent with these expectations. These findings suggest that, at least for non-experts, positive mood may eliminate the otherwise robust anchoring effect.

Keywords: anchoring effect; mood; expertise; assimilation; heuristics; judicial decision making. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://journal.sjdm.org/71130/jdm71130.pdf (application/pdf)
http://journal.sjdm.org/71130/jdm71130.html (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jdm:journl:v:4:y:2009:i:1:p:41-50

Access Statistics for this article

Judgment and Decision Making is edited by Jonathan Baron

More articles in Judgment and Decision Making from Society for Judgment and Decision Making
Series data maintained by Jonathan Baron ().