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decision making
Your first impression of a price sets the internal standard.
Tversky and Kahneman found that participants' estimates of unknown quantities are consistently pulled toward an arbitrary starting number.
When participants were asked to estimate the percentage of African nations in the UN, their answers were significantly influenced by a number randomly generated by a spinning wheel just before the question. The starting number acts as an anchor that our brains struggle to adjust away from.
The first number you encounter in a negotiation dictates the boundaries of your logic.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Tversky and Kahneman, 1974, Science
- What the check found
- The provided reference material identifies the work of Tversky and Kahneman in 1974 as the origin of the anchoring heuristic. While the text lacks the specific wheel-of-fortune quote, the experiment is textbook knowledge.
- Confidence
- Solid, with limits
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.