Second year experimental student, Hunter Norris, and experimental alumni Casey Smith ('19) presented their research on anchoring biases and wishful thinking at the annual conference of the Society of Judgment and Decision Making in Montréal, Canada.
Casey tested whether wishful thinking is influenced by the number of possible outcomes, and Hunter presented a set of three preregistered studies testing a well-publicized finding by Epley and Gilovich (2005) showing that forewarning decreases people's susceptibility to the biasing influence of anchors.
Hunter collected more than 10 times the sample of the original study, and his data challenged the original findings by demonstrating that warning people about the biasing influence of anchors had no effect on people’s decisions.
