Anchoring and Adjustment: Influence of Initial Numbers
Discover how the anchoring bias affects judgments based on initial numbers, even in rigged scenarios.
Page Summary
An in-depth explainer of the anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic, the process by which people estimate by starting from an initial value and adjusting insufficiently, opening with Tversky and Kahneman's 1974 rigged wheel-of-fortune experiment. It covers the competing cognitive accounts (insufficient adjustment, confirmatory hypothesis testing, and Epley and Gilovich's external-versus-self-generated anchor distinction), the role of cognitive load, four case studies (real-estate appraisal, clinical diagnosis, legal sentencing, investment valuation), effect sizes, the limits of debiasing, and boundary conditions.
Contributions
Every accepted correction to this page is recorded with the exact change, so readers can see how the page improved over time.
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2 corrections applied: Furnham & Boo (2011) appeared in The Journal of Socio-Economics (40(1), 35-42), not the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making; also removes contradictory '2006' framing | Wilson et al. (1996) was published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 125(4), not JPSP 71(4)
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Why: Body text, bibliography, and seo_keywords already correctly cite Furnham and Boo (2011) as The Journal of Socio-Economics and Wilson, Houston, Etling, and Brekke (1996) as Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 125(4), 387-402. FAQ checked, no fabrication present. No changes needed.
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