Heuristic Strategies for Estimation under Uncertainty: The Enigmatic Case of Anchoring
Galen V. Bodenhausen, Alan J. Lambert · Psychology Press eBooks · 2004
More than 20 years later, the insight that judgments are based on accessible information seems almost trivial. Of course, information only enters into a judgment if it can be accessed from memory. But at the time Bob Wyer and Tom Srull conducted the studies that supported their statement, social psychology was still far removed from asking how judgments &s;were formed. Instead, it was the cognitive structure that was the focus of researchers&s; attention, not the process that led to the outcome. Cognitions were assumed to be "just there," and hardly anybody asked about the conditions under which they became an input to further processing. To be sure, the ac- cessibiliry principle was implied in other programs of research (e.g., Bruner, 1957; Higgins, Rholes , & Jones, 1977; Taylor & Fiske, 1978; Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). However, it is Srull and Wyer&s;s merit to recognize that the accessibility principle applies not only to selected tasks but is perhaps the most basic law in social cognition, and its apparent triviality speaks to its tremendous success (for a more elaborate account of social information processing, see also Wyer & Srull, 1986, 1989).