What have I just done? Anchoring, self-knowledge, and judgments of recent behavior

Can numerical anchors influence people’s judgments of their own recent behavior? We investigate this question in a series of six studies. In Study 1, subjects’ judgments of how many anagrams they were given assimilated to numerical anchors. Subjects’ judgments of how many math problems they correctly solved and how many stairs they had just walked up were also influenced by numerical anchors (Studies 2A and 3A), and this occurred even when the anchors were extreme and nonsensical (Studies 2B and 3B). Thus, our first five studies showed that anchors can affect people’s judgments of their own recent behavior. Finally, in Study 4, we tested the hypothesis that self-knowledge, despite not eliminating anchoring effects, does still attenuate anchoring. However, we found no evidence that self-knowledge reduced anchoring: subjects’ judgments of their own recent behavior and subjects’ judgments of other people’s recent behavior were equally influenced by anchors. We discuss implications of these findings for research on domain knowledge and anchoring, as well as for research on the malleability of memory.