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In previous anchoring studies people were asked to consider an anchor as a possible answer to the target question or were given informative anchors. The authors predicted that basic anchoring effects can occur, whereby uninformative numerical anchors influence a judgment even when people are not asked to compare this number to the target value. Five studies supported these hypotheses: Basic anchoring occurs if people pay sufficient attention to the anchor value; knowledgeable people are less susceptible to basic anchoring effects; anchoring appears to operate unintentionally and nonconsciously in that it is difficult to avoid even when people are forewarned. The possible mechanisms of basic anchoring and the relation between these mechanisms and other processes of judgment and correction are discussed.

Sex stereotype assessment studies demonstrate that certain personality traits, such as assertiveness, are believed to occur more often among men, whereas other traits, such as passivity, are believed to occur more often among women. These stereotypic beliefs have been widely assumed to affect judgments of individuals. Surprisingly, an experiment conducted to test this assumption obtained no evidence for effects of sex stereotypes on subjects' judgments about a target individual. Instead, subjects' judgments were strongly influenced by behavioral information about the target. To explain these results, it is noted that the predicted effects of social stereotypes on judgments of individuals conform to Bayes' theorem for the normative use of prior probabilities in judgment tasks, inasmuch as stereotypic beliefs may be regarded as intuitive estimates for the probabilities of traits in social groups. Research in the psychology of prediction has demonstrated that people often neglect prior probabilities when making predictions about individuals, especially when they have individuating information about the person that is subjectively diagnostic of the criterion. An important implication of this research is that a minimal amount of subjectively diagnostic target case information should be sufficient to eradicate effects of stereotypes on judgments about individuals. A second experiment conducted to test this hypothesis supported the argument.Sex stereotypes have been measured off and significantly different mean ratings have been on for over 20 years, and the results have been conceptually similar across time and across quite consistent. Different studies of sex studies. In essence, the typical man is described stereotypes have all used a similar assessment as more assertive, active, objective, rational, format. In general, subjects have been pre-and competent than the typical woman; the sented with a list of personality traits and typical woman is described as more passive, asked to rate the extent to which each attri-emotional, submissive, compassionate, and bute is characteristic of the typical man and socially sensitive (Bern, 1974; Broverman, the typical woman. The attributes receiving Vogel,

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