I suggest renaming the “Incidental anchoring” section to something else, such as “irrelevant anchors” or “transparently random anchors”, since the term “incidental anchoring” is used to refer to something else.
Also, one of the classic 1970s Kahneman & Tversky anchoring studies used a (apparently) random wheel of fortune to generate a transparently irrelevant anchor value—the one on African countries in the UN. When this came up on LW previously, it turned out that Andrew Gelman used it as an in-class demo and (said that he) generally found effects in the predicted direction (though instead of spinning a viscerally random wheel they just handed each student a piece of paper that included the sentences “We chose (by computer) a random number between 0 and 100. The number selected and assigned to you is X = ___”).
I made the change to “irrelevant anchors”, thanks.
though instead of spinning a viscerally random wheel they just handed each student a piece of paper that included the sentences “We chose (by computer) a random number between 0 and 100. The number selected and assigned to you is X = ___”
What’s funny is that these kinds of small changes (a piece of paper vs. spinning a wheel) might be responsible for if the effects appear or not, at least if you take the published research at face value.
I suggest renaming the “Incidental anchoring” section to something else, such as “irrelevant anchors” or “transparently random anchors”, since the term “incidental anchoring” is used to refer to something else.
Also, one of the classic 1970s Kahneman & Tversky anchoring studies used a (apparently) random wheel of fortune to generate a transparently irrelevant anchor value—the one on African countries in the UN. When this came up on LW previously, it turned out that Andrew Gelman used it as an in-class demo and (said that he) generally found effects in the predicted direction (though instead of spinning a viscerally random wheel they just handed each student a piece of paper that included the sentences “We chose (by computer) a random number between 0 and 100. The number selected and assigned to you is X = ___”).
I made the change to “irrelevant anchors”, thanks.
What’s funny is that these kinds of small changes (a piece of paper vs. spinning a wheel) might be responsible for if the effects appear or not, at least if you take the published research at face value.