Is Anchoring on Estimates of Severity an Adaptive Heuristic?

<p>Decisions to either to prepare or not prepare for weather threats involve uncertainty. Uncertainty in decision making often involves the potential for making either a false positive (preparing for a storm that never arrives) or a false negative error (not preparing for a real storm). Error Management Theory (EMT; Haselton & Buss, 2000) posits that, depending on the uncertain context, people select a decision-making strategy that favors one error over the other. Related to weather, research has shown that people prefer a false positive, or an overestimation (Joslyn et al., 2011). Particularly, this overestimation appears when people receive severe information prior to making a judgment. Thus, the present study tested whether or not the quality of severity influenced people to select a bias towards a false positive error. In two studies, participants made judgments about Friday’s weather after viewing nine different sequences of two forecasts (sunny, cloudy, or stormy) from early in the week (Study 1) or after viewing weather forecasts from Monday and Wednesday (Study 2). In both studies, participants tended to base their judgments on the second forecast. The interpretation of this pattern, however, differs between the two studies based on anchor-type. In Study 1, bias toward the second forecast was the best available, least biased decision-making strategy. In Study 2, however, bias toward the second forecast was irrational because Wednesday’s weather is not informative for Friday’s weather. Thus, Study 2 demonstrated an anchoring-like bias.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science in Experimental Psychology (M.S.)

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis (open access)

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Department of Psychology

Year dc:date.available

2014

Author dc:creator

• Losee, Joy E

Contributors dc:contributor

• Lawrence Locker
• Kent D. Bodily

• ETD
• decision-making
• heuristics
• anchoring
• Cognitive Psychology
• Social Psychology

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/etd/1117

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu:etd-2133