Nudging Raters towards Feedback: Effects of Regulatory Focus and Idea Partitioning on Rater’s Attendance on and their Tendency to Follow Feedback Information in Idea Selection

Abstract

In idea selection, raters can attend and rely on information from multiple sources to determine which ideas are worthy for further consideration. Since that information can include feedback from external sources (e.g. number of likes from a community), it has the potential to act as anchor cues that impact decision making. Up to now, little is known about the susceptibility of raters to such information depends on individual’s motivational orientation (regulatory focus) as well as on the number of ideas presented simultaneously per subset. Using eye-tracking methods, findings show that anchoring-effect is less salient when raters were primed to prevention focus, although they searched more extensively for feedback information than their counterparts with promotion focus. Moreover, reducing the number of presented ideas per subset in prevention focus further decreased susceptibility to anchor cues.