I believe the anchor­ing effect to be one of the most intrigu­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal phe­nom­ena, mainly due to its impact, ease of obser­va­tion and ease of use. I’ve writ­ten much about anchor­ing before and find it hard to resist new stud­ies on the topic.

One recent study shows that even irrel­e­vant anchors can be used to pref­er­en­tially anchor per­sonal per­for­mance judge­ments:

Three stud­ies were con­ducted inves­ti­gat­ing the effects of irrel­e­vant anchors on per­for­mance judg­ments. Both a lab and field study demon­strated that an alter­na­tive anchor­ing manip­u­la­tion that did not involve an explicit com­par­a­tive ques­tion had effects on per­for­mance judg­ments sim­i­lar to a tra­di­tional anchor­ing manip­u­la­tion. The final study exam­ined whether the anchor­ing effects were more likely when the anchor was highly applic­a­ble to the final judg­ment. The results indi­cated that both highly applic­a­ble and low applic­a­ble anchors pro­duced an anchor­ing effect, but the highly applic­a­ble anchors had a larger effect on per­for­mance judgments.

via Bark­ing Up the Wrong Tree