Anchoring
Estimates and judgements pulled toward an initial value or impression, even an arbitrary one, with too little adjustment away from it.
What drives it
A starting point reduces effort under uncertainty. With people, the first data point (a CV headline, a referee's adjective, a predecessor's verdict) becomes the reference against which everything later is read as a deviation.
How it shows
Work
Salary set by whoever names a number first. Ratings anchored on last year's rating or on the self-rating. A handover note saying 'she's a bit difficult' sets the new manager's baseline. Interview panels that converge on the first person to speak.
Relationships
What a friend told you about someone before you met them frames everything after. 'Mum said he was a moody child' becomes the starting estimate of his moods for decades.
Self
Ask where your current estimate of someone came from. If you can trace it to the first thing you heard or to someone else's number, and your view has moved only a little since, you are anchored.
What tells it apart
Confirmation bias: Anchoring works even with values known to be random and needs no belief to defend; confirmation bias needs a hypothesis and shows in which evidence the person goes looking for.
Halo effect: Halo spreads one salient trait across unrelated traits at the same moment; anchoring is a first value that later judgements of the same thing fail to move far from.
A test
Form an independent estimate before seeing the prior rating, referee comment or opening number, then compare; a large gap between your blind and your anchored judgement shows the pull.
Questions to carry
- What was the first number, adjective or opinion heard about this person, and how far has the current view moved from it?
- Whose first word about someone is still the yardstick I use to read everything they do?
How strong the research is
strong
Where it comes from
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, 1974
Sources
- Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (1974)
- Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)