When given the Gandhi example we can’t be bothered to make the massive adjustment from the anchor we’re given up to the real value, so we go some way and then stop. Perhaps, then, it’s all down to our fundamental laziness. The problem is that this explanation is less satisfying when the anchor is so manifestly unhelpful, like when you tell people that Gandhi was older than nine when he died. In this case it’s easy: plenty of diamond rings cost about that, no matter the value of this particular ring.įor all I know about diamond rings it could be worth £500 or £50,000. So, if I’m told the price of a particular diamond ring is £5,000, I’ll tend to search around looking for evidence that confirms this. It is thought to stem from our tendency to look for confirmation of things we are unsure of. There is, though, a modern favourite for explaining the anchoring bias in decision-making. Since the anchoring bias occurs in so many situations, no one theory has satisfactorily explained it. Incidentally, the anchoring bias is another reason that you should open negotiations rather than waiting for the employer to tell you the range: because then you can set the anchor higher (more on this in: Ten Powerful Steps to Negotiating a Higher Salary). There’s some evidence that when the initial anchor figure is set high, the final negotiated amount will usually be higher ( Thorsteinson, 2011). You can see the effect of the anchoring bias in salary negotiations. Still, there’s a good reason sticker prices on car forecourts are mostly so high. People usually have a choice about which house or car to buy or which deal to take and they can always walk away. In real life things are more complicated than the Gandhi experiment. That doesn’t mean you just set the highest possible price you can get away with (although in reality that’s often what is done). Whether we like it or not, our minds keep referring back to that initial number. The initial price you set for the car, house or, more abstractly, for a deal of some kind, tends to have ramifications right through the process of coming to an agreement. That’s because the anchoring bias is vital in all these lines of work, and many more. Real estate agents, car sellers or negotiators will be nodding their heads. That’s why people who have just had lunch feel like they’ll never be hungry again compared with those who haven’t, who don’t display the same short-sightedness (I have described the relevant study in the context of the projection bias). Psychologists have found it can be difficult to predict our future emotions and one reason is that the anchoring bias affects how we feel right now. This sort of things is going on in loads of different areas of our lives. We have a tendency to use anchors or reference points to make decisions and evaluations, and sometimes these lead us astray. It’s so basic to how we experience the world that we often don’t notice it. These might seem like silly little experiments that psychologists do to try and suggest that people are idiots, but actually it’s showing us something fundamental about the way we think. Neither was that close, he was actually assassinated at 87 but you can still see the effect of the anchoring bias on the initial number. In their experiment, the first group guessed an average age of 50 and the second, 67. This is the anchoring bias, effect or heuristic. So why bother making these apparently stupid statements?īecause, according to the results of a study conducted by ( Strack & Mussweiler, 1997), these initial statements, despite being unhelpful, affect the estimates people make. Anyone who has any clue who Gandhi was will know that he was definitely older than 9 while the oldest person who ever lived was 122.
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