How do we judge others’ emotions? A standard account of emotion judgments is that we can accurately detect emotions from facial expressions, or infer emotions from verbally presented information about another person’s situation. In this paper, I tested the hypothesis that people would judge another’s emotion by using the context as a starting point for judgment, viz. an anchor. Participants were provided with an anchor, either contextual information (Study 1) or a number (Study 3 and Study 4), before being asked to judge a protagonist’s emotions based on a simple description of the protagonist’s situation. Judgments of the protagonist’s emotions were found to vary as a function of the anchors. The degree of deviation from the anchor increased as participants adjusted from it to accommod...[ Read more ]

How do we judge others’ emotions? A standard account of emotion judgments is that we can accurately detect emotions from facial expressions, or infer emotions from verbally presented information about another person’s situation. In this paper, I tested the hypothesis that people would judge another’s emotion by using the context as a starting point for judgment, viz. an anchor. Participants were provided with an anchor, either contextual information (Study 1) or a number (Study 3 and Study 4), before being asked to judge a protagonist’s emotions based on a simple description of the protagonist’s situation. Judgments of the protagonist’s emotions were found to vary as a function of the anchors. The degree of deviation from the anchor increased as participants adjusted from it to accommodate ambiguity in the emotions of the protagonists. Such adjustments increased when participants were more inclined to comply with an instruction telling them to neglect the anchors they had viewed (Study 2) or when participants were less inclined to accept the anchors as a plausible estimate of others’ emotions (Study 5). Taken together, the findings suggest that people rely on anchoring and adjustment heuristics that employ anchors available in the context of judgments for emotion judgments.