![]() That is, someone says “Is it higher or lower than this anchor?” and then you make a judgment. Through all of these examples, the anchor has been a key part of the judgment process. People’s judgments can even be biased by anchors based on their own social security numbers. That’s a pretty big difference in estimates, and it comes from a random change in a completely arbitrary value. If the wheel had landed on 10, people tended to say about 25% of countries in the UN are African, but if the wheel had landed on 65, they tended to say about 45% of countries in the UN are African. Even these random anchors ended up biasing people’s estimates. To generate a starting point, though, the researchers spun a “Wheel-of- Fortune” type of wheel with numbers between 0 – 100.įor whichever number the wheel landed on, people said whether they thought the real answer was more or less than that number. To test this idea, one study asked people to guess the percentage of African countries in the United Nations. The truth is that these anchors bias judgments even when everyone realizes how arbitrary they are. After all, you’ve got to start somewhere!īut what if the starting point is totally arbitrary? Sure, the “150 feet” anchor from before probably seems pretty arbitrary, but at the time you might have thought “Why would he have started me at 150 feet? It must be a meaningful starting point.” Figure 3. ![]() When you think about, even though we’re biased by the starting point, it sounds like a decent strategy. This paints an interesting picture of how we strive to be reasonable by adopting a pretty decent strategy for coming up with numerical estimates. The tricks we use to do that are called heuristics.īiased By Completely Arbitrary Starting Points ![]() We’re busy! We have lives! I can’t sit around and do the math anytime I want to know how far away a stop sign is, so I make estimates based on pretty reliable rules of thumb. Oh, you thought people were completely rational every time they make a decision? It’s nice to think, but it’s not always what happens. The reason is what’s called the anchoring heuristic.īack in the 1970s, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman identified a few reliable mental shortcuts people use when they have to make judgments. How’d you do? If I were to guess, based on the psychology I’m about to share with you, you probably undershot it. Everest is? (Don’t Google it-that kind of defeats the purpose) You probably don’t know the exact number, but do you think it’s taller or shorter than 150 feet? Assuming you said “taller”, make a guess. Also known as "focalism", the anchoring bias refers to the tendency to accept and rely on the first piece of information as the sole or primary foundation for making a decision.\) Findings indicate that anchoring significantly affected judgments of self-efficacy.Įditor's Note: Anchoring bias is a type of judgmental heuristic that reduces complex inferential tasks to simpler cognitive operations. In both studies, self-efficacy was predictive of both between-group differences and variations in performance within the anchoring conditions. The second experiment, conducted with 23 high school students, replicated these results. Differences in task persistence paralleled the differences in self-efficacy judgments, with High-anchor Students displaying the highest level of task persistence. High-anchor Students evidenced the highest judgments of their capabilities and Low-anchor Students the lowest judgments. Anchoring biases strongly affected self-efficacy judgments. Students in a control condition received no anchor values. In the first experiment, 62 undergraduates judged their capabilities for performance on a problem-solving task after exposure to ostensibly random anchor values representing either high or low levels of performance. Two experiments addressed relations between judgmental processes and action by examining both the impact of the anchoring/adjustment heuristic on judgments of performance capabilities and the subsequent impact of these self-efficacy judgments on behavior.
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