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.

We define mental contamination as the process whereby a person has an unwanted response because of mental processing that is unconscious or uncontrollable. This type of bias is distinguishable from the failure to know or apply normative rules of inference and can be further divided into the unwanted consequences of automatic processing and source confusion, which is the confusion of 2 or more causes of a response. Mental contamination is difficult to avoid because it results from both fundamental properties of human cognition (e.g., a lack of awareness of mental processes) and faulty lay beliefs about the mind (e.g., incorrect theories about mental biases). People's lay beliefs determine the steps they take (or fail to take) to correct their judgments and thus are an important but neglected source of biased responses. Strategies for avoiding contamination, such as controlling one's exposure to biasing information, are discussed.