Abstract

Anchoring effect refers to the phenomenon that judgments under uncertainty are likely to be influenced too much by numerical information given in advance. The previous efforts that investigated underlying mechanisms of the anchoring effects were relatively cognitive-oriented and have mostly ignored the interpersonal and social factors. But the contexts in which the anchoring effects occur involve always at least two real or hypothetical persons, information giver and receiver. The present study examined the role of source credibility (how credible the person who provides the anchoring information is) in anchoring effects. A pretest adapted from Jacowitz & Kahneman (1995) was conducted to selected the issue items that showed the biggest anchoring effects in Korea. In Study 1 of computer-administrated experiment, participants first made their own ranks potential source persons with various jobs on expertise for each issue and then made their own judgments on the issues when given anchoring information either from highly credible sources or low credible sources. As expected, the information given by high credible sources caused larger anchoring effects than that by low credible sources. In order to ruling out the possibility of demand characteristics, Study 2 replicated the finding by employing a between-subject design. Those findings were discussed suggesting the social and interpersonal perspective for understanding the anchoring effect.