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Anchoring Effect
First investigated by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnemann in 1974, this effect describes the psychological heuristic of relying too heavily on one specific piece of information (i.e., an anchor) as a result of the way in which information is presented. In one of the first studies by Kahneman and Tversky, participants were asked to estimate the percentage of African countries in the United Nations. Before that, some were asked to first decide whether the percentage was more or less than 45%, while other participants were asked whether it was more or less than 65%. Participants who had seen the higher percentage consistently produced higher estimates than participants who were initially presented with the lower percentage. Since these first experiments, the anchoring effect has been shown ...