Do Researchers Anchor Their Beliefs on the Outcome of an Initial Study? is a research paper published in Experimental Psychology (2018). On theSindex it has a DataRank of 0.951. It has been cited 10 times, with 10 citing works in its 1-hop citation network.
As a research field expands, scientists have to update their knowledge and integrate the outcomes of a sequence of studies. However, such integrative judgments are generally known to fall victim to a primacy bias where people anchor their judgments on the initial information. In this preregistered study we tested the hypothesis that people anchor on the outcome of a small initial study, reducing the impact of a larger subsequent study that contradicts the initial result. Contrary to our expectation, undergraduates and academics displayed a recency bias, anchoring their judgment on the research outcome presented last. This recency bias is due to the fact that unsuccessful replications decreased trust in an effect more than did unsuccessful initial experiments. We recommend the time-reversal heuristic to account for temporal order effects during integration of research results.
FAIR checklist signals are shown for context only and do not affect DataRank scoring.
Base Score Contribution
0.360
From this paper's citation signal
Citation Network Contribution
0.591
From 10 citing papers with measurable signal
Ranked by citation count — the same ordering the engine uses when summing log1p(Cq) over citers.
DataRank blends this paper's own citation count with the influence of the papers that cite it. Here, roughly 38% comes from its base citations and 62% from the citation network (10 citing papers contributed measurable signal).
Citers are pulled from OpenAlex sorted by cited_by_count:descand capped per paper, so when the cap binds we keep the highest-signal references and the score is reproducible across reruns.
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