Toward a theory of own-anchoring in judgments of other people's external characteristics

Abstract

The own-anchor effect concerns the assimilation of judgments of other people's external characteristics such as age, weight, and height toward the estimator's own characteristics. The phenomenon is related to theories of social projection and classical anchoring. It has previously been described as an estimation bias in studies of eyewitness accuracy and has been measured by the correlation between the estimates and the participants' own corresponding characteristics. We suggest that the term own-anchor effect should be reserved for cases when the estimate and the estimator's own value both are bigger than the target person's value, or when both are smaller than the target person's value. Two subtypes of own-anchoring and their association to different target persons of different ages and sizes are also described. A new index of own-anchoring based on the deviation between the estimate and the target persons' values is introduced, and differences between the two measures are discussed, as well as the implications for moderation by gender.