Debias Human Judgment with a Common Decision Bias: An Experimental Study of the Anchoring Effect in Hiring Decision-Making

Abstract

Hiring decision-making is heavily based on intuition-based approaches (e.g., expert judgment, group consensus meetings) despite extensive research supporting the use of analytical approaches (e.g., algorithms, statistical equations). Both individual level and organizational level factors contribute to practitioners’ resistance to using statistical methods. Given that the reliance on human intuition is likely to persist, it is important to identify interventions that improve the accuracy of human judgment when making hiring decisions. The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of eliciting a favorable anchoring effect to improve hiring decisions. Although the anchoring effect is a common decision bias, it may increase the accuracy of human predictions, which are aligned with the anchors, if the anchors are valid predictions of the outcome. Specifically, four questions are examined: 1) Does providing decision makers with external predictions (i.e., anchors) affect the decision policy and the accuracy of human judgment? 2) Do features of the anchors (i.e., source and precision) affect the degree of anchoring and the accuracy of human judgment? 3) Do individual differences predict anchoring susceptibility? and 4) Do individual differences interact with anchor features when predicting the degree of anchoring?