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 repre- sentative 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 encod- ing 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.