Anchoring and Adjusting in Questionnaire Responses

Do survey designers bias respondents' answers on attitude/opinion questionnaires through the organization of their survey items? We hypothesize that respondents often employ an anchoring and adjusting strategy in which their response to an initial survey item provides a cognitive anchor from which they insufficiently adjust in answering the subsequent item. Three experiments indicate that respondents often anchor and insufficiently adjust in certain situations. Ultimately, this tendency can affect reliability estimates of scales and the resultant correlations with other measures. In organizing their surveys, researchers may wish to combat this bias by intermixing items designed for different but related constructs.