Fooling with facts: Quantifying anchoring bias through a large-scale online experiment

TL;DR

This study provides large-scale empirical evidence that anchoring bias significantly influences people's judgments across various tasks, regardless of individual differences, highlighting the need for careful information regulation online.

Contribution

It offers the first large-scale online experiment quantifying the pervasive impact of anchoring bias on decision making across diverse contexts.

Findings

Anchoring bias affects judgments regardless of engagement or gender.

Participants showed consistent susceptibility to anchors across tasks.

The influence of anchors is strong and widespread, necessitating regulation of information online.

Abstract

Living in the 'Information Age' means that not only access to information has become easier but also that the distribution of information is more dynamic than ever. Through a large-scale online field experiment, we provide new empirical evidence for the presence of the anchoring bias in people's judgment due to irrational reliance on a piece of information that they are initially given. The comparison of the anchoring stimuli and respective responses across different tasks reveals a positive, yet complex relationship between the anchors and the bias in participants' predictions of the outcomes of events in the future. Participants in the treatment group were equally susceptible to the anchors regardless of their level of engagement, previous performance, or gender. Given the strong and ubiquitous influence of anchors quantified here, we should take great care to closely monitor and regulate the distribution of information online to facilitate less biased decision making.