The impact of procedural priming of selective accessibility on self-generated and experimenter-provided anchors

Anchoring is often considered to be the product of two distinct processes: (a) the under-adjustment associated with the anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic, when individuals provide their own anchors; and (b) selective accessibility, when an experiment provides an anchor. The evidence for the existence of two distinct processes mostly comes from the differential impact of effort across anchor types (self-generated vs. experimenter-provided). The present work challenges this distinction by demonstrating that priming selective accessibility (a) impacts the anchoring bias independently of the type of anchor and (b) interacts with effort in the same way across both sources of anchors. Therefore, the present results challenge the dichotomy between selective accessibility and anchoring-and-adjustment as two independent processes. Instead, they suggest the idea that these processes are both responsible for yielding the commonly observed anchoring phenomenon.