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Anchoring

The last two digits of your telephone number have absolutely nothing to do with your life expectancy. And yet, thinking about those two digits may influence your estimates of the amount of time you have to live. First consider, for instance, whether your life expectancy is longer or shorter than those last two digits, and now estimate your actual life expectancy. If your last two digits are small numbers (e.g., 11), you are likely to estimate that your life expectancy is shorter than if those two digits are large numbers (e.g., 99). This is an example of anchoring, a general term used to describe cases in which a person's judgment or evaluation is influenced by—or anchored on—salient information in one's environment. In most cases, anchors exert a drag on the judgment and render final estimates biased in the direction of the original anchor value, whether those anchor values are relevant to the judgment at hand or not.

Anchoring has been used to describe two very different aspects of judgment and evaluation. The first is as a phenomenon, to describe cases in which a person's judgment or evaluation is influenced by an anchor value. The second is as a process, to describe the psychological mechanisms that enable people to make judgments and evaluations under conditions of uncertainty.

Anchoring as a Phenomenon

Psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman conducted a simple, and now classic, experiment in which participants watched an experimenter spin a wheel that landed randomly on a large or small number. People were then asked to estimate whether the percentage of African countries in the United Nations was larger or smaller than that number, and then to estimate the actual percentage. Even though completely random, the anchor value generated by the wheel biased people's judgments in the direction of the anchor value. For instance, the median estimates of those who considered 10 and 65 as anchor values were 25 and 45, respectively.

Anchoring effects like these have since been demonstrated in a wide variety of contexts. Shoppers buy more Snickers bars when the store's advertisement recommends buying “18 for your freezer” than when it recommends buying “some for your freezer.” Auto mechanics estimate that repairs will be less expensive when a car owner asks if the cost will be more or less than a relatively low amount than when the owner asks about a relatively high amount. And court judges recommend a longer criminal sentence after considering a prosecutor's high anchor value than after considering a defense attorney's low anchor value. Although nonexperts tend to be more strongly influenced by arbitrary anchors, even experts ranging from lawyers to doctors to real estate agents can be influenced in their field of expertise as well.

Psychologists do not believe that anchoring effects are restricted to purely numeric estimates. For instance, anchoring has been used to describe egocentric biases in which people's estimates of others' preferences seem to be anchored on one's own preferences. A person who likes diet cola is more likely to believe that others like diet cola than is a person who dislikes diet cola. So, too, do people's final impressions of others tend to be biased, or anchored, on their first impressions, even when those first impressions are known to be false or misleading.

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