Does ego depletion reduce judgment adjustment for both internally and externally generated anchors?

Publication date: March 2020Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 87Author(s): Lukas Röseler, Astrid Schütz, Roy F. Baumeister, Ulrike StarkerAbstractEgo depletion is a state in which people prefer to avoid mental effort, therefore possibly leading to increased reliance on heuristics. Effortful thinking has been shown to help reduce anchoring effects, in which people form social judgments by adjusting from an initial value (the anchor). We therefore predicted that ego depletion would reduce the amount of adjustment from an initial anchor, leaving the final judgment relatively close to the anchor value. In contrast to previous research by Banker et al. (2017), we excluded alternative explanations, such as social mechanisms. In particular, we tested adjustment from internally generated and externally provided anchors. We theorized that judgment adjustment processes are the same for both internal and external cues. The results showed that neither self-generated nor experimenter-provided anchors were affected by ego depletion, thus leaving social mechanisms as the prime alternative explanation. The data also showed that susceptibility to anchoring is not a trait because reactions to different anchors were not substantially intercorrelated. Further, providing externally or internally generated anchors did not make a fundamental difference. However, the loss of data was higher with self-generated anchors. Overall, the results suggest that researchers can confi...

Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology - January 21, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research