Compound Anchors and Their Subsequent Effects on Judgments

In this article, the authors first demonstrate the applicability of a standard anchoring paradigm to situations where both the anchor and subsequent target are compound concepts (Study 1). They next show that systematically varying the target so that it is increasingly different from the anchor leads to diminishing anchoring effects (Study 2). Finally, they demonstrate that the degree to which the anchoring effect occurs as such targets vary from anchors depends on which concept of the compound is made to vary from its analogue in the anchor (Studies 2 and 3).