Sadness and susceptibility to judgmental bibs: The case of anchoring

In a wide range of empirical empirical paradigms, sadness has been associat ed with mole extensive and detail-oriented thinking than happiness, resulti ng in reductions in judgemental bins that arise from reliance on stereotype s and other simple decision heuristics. It was hypothesized that anchoring would constitute a significant exception to this general pattern. Recent re search on anchoring indicates that an active thought process underlies the emergence of this bias. If sad people are likely to think more actively abo ut the judgmental anchor than their neutral-mood counterparts, their subseq uent judgments should be more likely to be assimilated toward this referenc e point. This prediction was confirmed in two experiments demonstrating tha t sad people are indeed more susceptible to anchoring bias than are people in a neutral mood. Moreover; this effect generalized over judgments in posi tive, neutral, and negative content domains.