Numerical Judgments and Recall by Consumers: Selective Accessibility under Prevention and Promotion Motivations

Prior research suggests that people’s numerical estimates are often excessively influenced by an arbitrary anchor given during earlier comparative judgments (“anchoring bias”). In the current research, we suggest that such biases are subject to motivational influences of regulatory focus. Across three studies, we found that compared to a promotion focus, prevention focus leads to greater anchoring bias. It is also found that in responding to the anchoring questions, prevention-focused people generated more thoughts consistent with the anchor and such a difference in proportion of anchor-consistent thoughts mediated the heightened anchoring biases. Finally, even though prevention-focused people relied heavily on the anchors in making their estimates, they also demonstrated a greater “hindsight bias” in that after receiving outcome knowledge (i.e., information on the true value), they recalled their earlier estimates to be more accurate than they actually were. We argue that these greater biases stem from the same underlying process, that is, selective retrieval of information consistent with the initial anchor (“anchoring bias”) or the outcome knowledge (“hindsight bias”) for prevention-focused individuals. Taken together, such differences reflect prevention-focused individuals’ vigilant and focused processing style.