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Inducing and Detecting Anchoring Bias via Game-Play in Time-extended Decision-Making Tasks

Authors:
Prithviraj Dasgupta
John Kliem
Mark Livingston
Jonathan Decker

Keywords: anchoring bias; decision-making; human participant user study.

Abstract:
We consider the problem of detecting anchoring bias in problems where a decision maker has to make multiple, correlated decisions over time. The main research question we investigate is whether the problem’s solution from working on the problem multiple times has an anchoring effect on the decisions made to solve the problem in the future. To address this question, we propose a computer-based navigation game where an autonomous agent dynamically adapts initially hidden information that is required by human players to solve the game, in successive iterations of the game. We use the navigation decisions made by human players while playing the game, as the game information gets incrementally revealed, to infer the presence of anchoring bias in the player’s decisions. Our results with game-playing data collected from 74 human subjects comprising Navy and Marine trainee personnel show a strong evidence of anchoring bias, although the bias diminishes rapidly after the player is exposed to information that contradicts the information in the anchor. We have also validated our results using an anchoring bias model from literature to show that our results conform to the model in 77-80 percent of game-play instances.

Pages: 149 to 154

Copyright: Copyright (c) The Government of United States of America, 2025. Used by permission to IARIA.

Publication date: July 6, 2025

Published in: conference

ISBN: 978-1-68558-284-5

Location: Venice, Italy

Dates: from July 6, 2025 to July 10, 2025