Research has found that people can easily become anchored to arbitrary points of information, even if the initial anchor is not relevant to the current situation. The effect has been demonstrated in a wide variety of settings and situations. Anchoring Bias CausesĮveryone is susceptible to anchoring bias. But when the roulette wheel stopped at 65, the average guess was 45%. When the roulette wheel had stopped at 10, the average guess on the U.N. After watching this, people were asked to guess the percentage of African nations members of the United Nations. In another variation of their research, participants watched a roulette wheel that would stop on either number 10 or number 65. The researchers even found that completely arbitrary, unrelated information could act as an anchor for future choices. Their later answers were influenced by whatever those initial anchor points were. Because there was no time to do the actual calculations, people would base their subsequent guesses on their first few calculations. In one early study, participants were asked to compute the product of a long list of numbers in a very short amount of time. This phenomenon was first described by the researchers Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. This bias can lead to poor decisions and skewed judgments that are inaccurate or don’t fully account for subsequent information. That information is an anchor or reference point from which all other judgments or decisions are formed. Factors that Influence the Anchoring Effectĭefinition: The anchoring bias is a cognitive bias that causes people to rely too much on the first piece of information they learn.
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