1) The study examined cultural differences in anchoring effect and confidence between Chinese and American students. 2) Both cultures demonstrated significant anchoring effects on 7-8 of 10 general knowledge questions. 3) Chinese students were more holistic thinkers and more confident in their estimates, though culture did not impact anchoring susceptibility. 4) Within cultures, more holistic thinking styles did not correlate with less anchoring, challenging previous findings. Experience may have confounded these results.

1. The Impact of East Asian and Western Variations on the Anchoring Effect and Confidence
Author: Jingdan “Diana” Zhu (jz4@stmarys-ca.edu)
Faculty Advisor: Emily Hause
Saint Mary’s College of California
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: I want to thank Dr. Emily Hausefor being my mentor on this project; Dr. Paul Zarnoth for introducing me to this research topic and teaching me how to conduct research; Nathan Cheek for his help with statistical analyses; Amy Bockman for the
reimbursement process; Antonio Yung for contacting Chongqing University (CQU); Xiang Gao at CQU for distributingmy survey; Dr. Yulan Han and Dr. Yan Zhang for the ChineseAHS translation;and lastly, the Summer Research Program for this wonderful experience.
Introduction
The Anchoring Effect: The phenomenon that, when
provided with anchors prior to an estimation,
people’s answers tend to be closer to whatever the
anchors are (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974).
Analytic vs. Holistic Thinking Styles (Nisbett et al.,
2001):
Confidence: Chinese were more confident than
Americans when estimating general knowledge
questions (Yates et al., 1997). In certain tasks,
people who were more accurate were also more
confident (Ji, Peng, & Nisbett, 2000).
Previous literature found that holistic thinkers were
less susceptible to the anchoring effect (r = .10, p <
.05) in the American population (Cheek and Norem,
2016). It was possibly because they were better able
to attend to the whole context rather than to just
focus on the anchors than analytic thinkers.
The current study aimed to:
1) replicate Cheek and Norem’s finding when
controlling for experience;
2) examine the finding cross-culturally;
3) add confidence as another variable to replicate
the previous result and examine whether
confidence predicted accuracy in the anchoring
condition.
Hypotheses
1. Participants would manifest the anchoring effect.
2. Cross-culturally, Chinese would be more holistic
than European Americans.
3. Chinese would anchor less than European
Americans.
4. Within one culture, the more holistic thinking
one adopts, the less one would anchor.
5. Chinese participants would be more confident
than American participants.
6. Within one culture, the less susceptible one is to
the anchors, the more confident one is.
Methods
Participants
342 Chinese college students in mainland China
• 147 female, 187 male, 7 unidentified gender
• All Chinese were rewarded 15 Yuan.
80 non-Asian American college students
• 58 female, 22 male; 52 European Americans, 28
non-European Americans
• 1/5 were rewarded $10 Amazon e-gift cards.
Materials
1. Ten Sets of Anchoring Questions: Ten culturally
neutral items were designed and tested in the
pilot study; of the 40 participants’ estimation, the
15th and 85th percentile answers were calculated
as the low and high anchors for the current study
(Jacowitz & Kahneman, 1995).
There are three questions in each set:
1) a comparative question with a randomly
assigned low or high anchor (see table 1)
e.g.: Do you think Africa has more or less than
15 countries?
2) participants’ own estimation
3) self-reported confidence on a scale of 1 to 7
2. The Analysis-Holism Scale (Choi et al., 2007)
Procedures
Students were recruited through Wechat posts,
school emails, and social media to complete the
questionnaire on SurveyMonkey.com.
Variables
Consistent with previous research on the Analytic-
Holistic thinking style, the cross-cultural analyses
only included European American participants.
Anchoring Index (see table 1): a descriptive statistic
showing the size of the anchoring effect for each
question (Jacowitz & Kahneman, 1995). Values
usually range from 0 (no anchoring effect) to 1
(median estimates = anchor).
AI =
!"#$%& ()$*) %&+),-) – !"#$%& (0,1 %&+),-)
)$*) %&+),- – 0,1 %&+),-
Anchoring Scores: an inferential statistic measuring
the anchoring susceptibility using a three-step
procedure (Simmons, LeBoeuf, & Nelson, 2010).
Higher scores indicate their answers are further
away from the anchors.
1) subtract each estimation to the received
anchor
2) standardize the absolute values from step one
3) average all ten values from step two.
Holistic Thinking Scores: the averages of the 24 AHS
items. Higher score indicated more holistic thinking.
• Chinese: Cronbach’s α = .636
• American: Cronbach’s α = .651
Confidence Scores: the averages of all ten self-
reported confidence score.
Discussion
1. The current study mainly served to replicate
previous decision making study results. It
confirmed that, in anchoring condition setting,
confidence predicted accuracy. Moreover,
overall, Chinese reported higher confidence than
European Americans regardless of accuracy.
2. The current study found opposing result from the
previous study that there is no difference
between analytic and holistic thinkers.
Experience might be the confound variable for
the previous significant finding that holistic
thinkers anchored less than analytic thinkers. As
known, experience was both one of the most
reliable factors influencing anchoring
susceptibility (Furnham & Boo, 2011), and
positively correlated with higher holistic thinking
(Nisbett et al., 2001).
3. This was the first study that explored anchoring
susceptibility with a cross-cultural sample, which
found that there is anchoring susceptibility
showed no variations due to culture .
Table 1: Statistics for the Anchoring Questions
Number Questions
Low/High
Anchor
Chinese American
AI t-test: t(342) AI t-test: t(80)
1 Number of countries in African continent 15/50 .77 -12.47*** .43 -3.40***
2 The year when United Nation was founded 1920/1970 .18 -10.41*** .41 -4.37***
3 Categories of sports in the 2016 Olympics 13/40 1.11 -8.47*** .96 -1.20
4 Life expectancy of wild elephants 25/80 .55 -11.45*** .45 -7.51***
5 The year when Yuri Gagarin went to outer space 1949/1975 .62 -1.95 .46 -6.04***
6 Number of naturally existing chemical elements 20/88 .65 -9.52*** .68 -5.70***
7 The year when cell phone was invented 1970/1990 .45 -2.90** .40 -2.23*
8 The year when Einstein published E = mc2 1890/1954 .80 -7.58*** .67 -5.58***
9 Number of vitamins that people need 5/40 .77 -18.05*** .57 -4.78***
10 Number of bones in adult humans 100/230 .83 -7.40*** .08 -2.28*
* = p < .05. ** = p < .01. *** = p < .001
AI: Anchoring Index
1. For both cultures, t tests between the low and
high anchor groups for each question showed
significant anchoring effect (see table 1).
• Chinese: 8 of 10 questions (α = .001)
• American: 7 of 10 questions (α = .001)
2. Chinese participants (M = 4.83) were more
holistic than European American participants (M
= 4.71) (t(394) = 2.13, p = .036).
3. Chinese did not anchor less than European
Americans (N = 394, r = -.047, p = .351).
4. Within one culture, holistic thinkers did not
anchor less.
• Chinese: (N = 342, r = -.048, p = .373).
• American: (N = 80, r = .053, p = .639).
5. Chinese were more confident than European
Americans (t(394) = 2.029, p = .046).
6. The further away the participants’ answers were
from the anchors, the more confident they were
• Chinese: (N = 342, r = .190, p = .001).
• American: (N = 80, r = .208, p = .065).
Results
Holistic Analytic
East Asian Western
Contextualization Decontextualization
Experience-based Logic-based
Taoism Aristotelian