Behavioral anchors as a source of bias in rating.

Behavioral anchors may affect the way that raters process information about ratees, and may in some cases be a source of bias in rating. This study tested the hypothesis that the presence of behavioral anchors that closely matched behaviors actually observed by raters would bias performance ratings. Subjects (N?=?180) viewed videotaped lectures and rated them, using scales that contained examples of either good or bad performance that had actually occurred on the tapes, but that were not representative of the ratee's overall performance. One half of the subjects read the scales before viewing the lectures; the remaining subjects read the scales only after viewing the lectures. There was a significant scale effect, but no Scale?×?Order interaction; ratings were biased in the direction of unrepresentative anchors. These results suggest that behavioral anchors can be a source of bias in ratings and they may lead to biased recall, but they probably do not bias the observation and encoding of ratee behavior. Our results suggest that behaviorally anchored scales are not necessarily more objective or less prone to bias than are scales without behavioral anchors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)