Anchoring Bias

Tversky & Kahneman (1974)

cognition

the mental state of acquiring and processing information

examples: memory, thinking, decision making or bias

anchoring bias

a bias where people tend to rely on the first piece of information when they are given a short amount of time to make a decision

dual process authors

Tversky and Kahneman

anchoring bias + dual process model

bias associated with system 1 as it bypasses system 2 due to the bias being a heuristic

due to the speed in which a decision is made in system 1 (intuitive, fast) anchoring bias can show error processing.

aim

investigate the influence of the anchoring bias on decision-making

procedure

The study is a lab experiment consisting of a sample of high school students

The participants were asked to compute within 5 seconds the product of the numbers one through eight

The sample was split into two conditions:

• low anchor (ascending)

• high anchor (descending)

Since there wasn’t enough time, the participants estimated the answer

The answer to the question, no matter the condition, was the same

results

The median for the ascending group was 512

The median for the descending group was 2250

The actual value was 40320

This shows that the first numbers seen by participants biased their answer

tok link

proves that the first pieces of information are the most important; the results show that human brains use the shortest shortcut to answer questions