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decision
Your first impression of a number dictates your final choice.
Providing an initial, arbitrary value significantly shifts your estimation of a subsequent, unrelated number.
Experiments show that even obviously irrelevant numbers influence how much people guess for things like house prices or quantities. Your mind lacks an absolute internal scale and relies on the anchor provided.
You are easily biased by the first figure you see.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Tversky and Kahneman, 1974
- What the check found
- The claim accurately describes the seminal findings of the 1974 Tversky and Kahneman paper, 'Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases'.
- Confidence
- Well replicated
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.