Update: 6/10/21
After I posted this post, I learned about a published meta-analysis and new studies of incidental anchoring by David Shanks and colleagues that came to the same conclusion (Shanks et al., 2020).
Introduction
“The most expensive car in the world costs $5 million. How much does a new BMW 530i cost?”
According to anchoring theory, information about the most expensive car can lead to higher estimates for the cost of a BMW. Anchoring effects have been demonstrated in many credible studies since the 1970s (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973).
A more controversial claim is that anchoring effects even occur when the numbers are unrelated to the question and presented incidentally (Criticher & Gilovich, 2008). In one study, participants saw a picture of a football player and were asked to guess how likely it is that the player will sack the football player in the next game. The player’s number on jersey was manipulated to be 54 or 94. The study produced a statistically significant result suggesting that a higher number makes people give higher likelihood judgments. This study started a small literature on incidental anchoring effects. A variation on this them are studies that presented numbers so briefly on a computer screen that most participants did not actually see the numbers. This is called subliminal priming. Allegedly, subliminal priming also produced anchoring effects (Mussweiler & Englich (2005).
Since 2011, many psychologists are skeptical whether statistically significant results in published articles can be trusted. The reason is that researchers only published results that supported their theoretical claims even when the claims were outlandish. For example, significant results also suggested that extraverts can foresee where pornographic images are displayed on a computer screen even before the computer randomly selected the location (Bem, 2011). No psychologist, except Bem, believes these findings. More problematic is that many other findings are equally incredible. A replication project found that only 25% of results in social psychology could be replicated (Open Science Collaboration, 2005). So, the question is whether incidental and subliminal anchoring are more like classic anchoring or more like extrasensory perception.
There are two ways to assess the credibility of published results when publication bias is present. One approach is to conduct credible replication studies that are published independent of the outcome of a study. The other approach is to conduct a meta-analysis of the published literature that corrects for publication bias. A recent article used both methods to examine whether incidental anchoring is a credible effect (Kvarven et al., 2020). In this article, the two approaches produced inconsistent results. The replication study produced a non-significant result with a tiny effect size, d = .04 (Klein et al., 2014). However, even with bias-correction, the meta-analysis suggested a significant, small to moderate effect size, d = .40.
Results
The data for the meta-analysis were obtained from an unpublished thesis (Henriksson, 2015). I suspected that the meta-analysis might have coded some studies incorrectly. Therefore, I conducted a new meta-analysis, using the same studies and one new study. The main difference between the two meta-analysis is that I coded studies based on the focal hypothesis test that was used to claim evidence for incidental anchoring. The p-values were then transformed into fisher-z transformed correlations and and sampling error, 1/sqrt(N – 3), based on the sample sizes of the studies.
Whereas the old meta-analysis suggested that there is no publication bias, the new meta-analysis showed a clear relationship between sampling error and effect sizes, b = 1.68, se = .56, z = 2.99, p = .003. Correcting for publication bias produced a non-significant intercept, b = .039, se = .058, z = 0.672, p = .502, suggesting that the real effect size is close to zero.
Figure 1 shows the regression line for this model in blue and the results from the replication study in green. We see that the blue and green lines intersect when sampling error is close to zero. As sampling error increases because sample sizes are smaller, the blue and green line diverge more and more. This shows that effect sizes in small samples are inflated by selection for significance.
However, there is some statistically significant variability in the effect sizes, I2 = 36.60%, p = .035. To further examine this heterogeneity, I conducted a z-curve analysis (Bartos & Schimmack, 2021; Brunner & Schimmack, 2020). A z-curve analysis converts p-values into z-statistics. The histogram of these z-statistics shows publication bias, when z-statistics cluster just above the significance criterion, z = 1.96.
Figure 2 shows a big pile of just significant results. As a result, the z-curve model predicts a large number of non-significant results that are absent. While the published articles have a 73% success rate, the observed discovery rate, the model estimates that the expected discovery rate is only 6%. That is, for every 100 tests of incidental anchoring, only 6 studies are expected to produce a significant result. To put this estimate in context, with alpha = .05, 5 studies are expected to be significant based on chance alone. The 95% confidence interval around this estimate includes 5% and is limited at 26% at the upper end. Thus, researchers who reported significant results did so based on studies with very low power and they needed luck or questionable research practices to get significant results.
A low discovery rate implies a high false positive risk. With an expected discovery rate of 6%, the false discovery risk is 76%. This is unacceptable. To reduce the false discovery risk, it is possible to lower the alpha criterion for significance. In this case, lowering alpha to .005 produces a false discovery risk of 5%. This leaves 5 studies that are significant.
One notable study with strong evidence, z = 3.70, examined anchoring effects for actual car sales. The data came from an actual auction of classic cars. The incidental anchors were the prices of the previous bid for a different vintage car. Based on sales data of 1,477 cars, the authors found a significant effect, b = .15, se = .04 that translates into a standardized effect size of d = .2 (fz = .087). Thus, while this study provides some evidence for incidental anchoring effects in one context, the effect size estimate is also consistent with the broader meta-analysis that effect sizes of incidental anchors are fairly small. Moreover, the incidental anchor in this study is still in the focus of attention and in some way related to the actual bid. Thus, weaker effects can be expected for anchors that are not related to the question at all (a player’s number) or anchors presented outside of awareness.
Conclusion
There is clear evidence that evidence for incidental anchoring cannot be trusted at face value. Consistent with research practices in general, studies on incidental and subliminal anchoring suffer from publication bias that undermines the credibility of the published results. Unbiased replication studies and meta-analysis suggest that incidental anchoring effects are either very small or zero. Thus, there exists currently no empirical support for the notion that irrelevant numeric information can bias numeric judgments. More research on anchoring effects that corrects for publication bias is needed.