Cognitive Ability does not and cannot Correlate with Susceptibility to Anchoring Effects

Abstract

On a scale from 1 to 10, would you consider anchoring effects to be more or less important than a rating of 9? The seminal studies on anchoring effects are still surrounded by many mysteries regarding the question of how these effects come about. One of the mysteries is the influence of a person’s cognitive ability. Some studies found that cognitive abilities moderated participants’ susceptibility to anchoring, but others did not. We aimed to resolve these inconsistencies by making a distinction between informative and uninformative (e.g., random) anchors. In a preregistered online experiment, we tested the hypothesis that anchoring effects are weaker for people with higher cognitive abilities but that this relation only occurs if the anchors are perceived as random, and it vanishes if they are presented as informative. We found no support for the hypothesis. Results from a meta-analysis of 15 effects across our study and four other studies revealed no overall effect of cognitive ability on the susceptibility to anchoring, g = 0.003, 95% CI [-0.031, 0.037], Ntotal = 1165. Moreover, we observed that 10 items across three typical anchoring tasks had only very low internal consistency (α = .11). Our analysis of additional published and unpublished data confirmed that a person’s susceptibility to anchoring cannot be measured reliably. This explains why previous results on possible moderators of anchoring (e.g., studies on the Big Five or on fluid intelligence) have been highly inconsistent. We suggest that research on anchoring moderators needs to take a step back and develop a reliable measure for the susceptibility to anchoring.

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