What is the anchoring principle?
Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2025 2:55 am
In 1598, in the article “Assimilation and the Influence of Anchoring Stimuli on Judgments,” researchers described the property of our brain to make decisions by attaching to a certain “anchor.” The title of the publication conveys the essence of the phenomenon. We need a starting point, an initial stimulus, a starting value for comparing all subsequent objects with it.
Later, in the 1970s, renowned scientists Amos egypt mobile database Tversky and Daniel Kahneman theorized the anchoring heuristic. In their experiments, they concluded that the number initially presented to a person affects the perception of all other values. It was this feature of our consciousness that Steve Jobs used in his iPad presentation.
The anchoring principle is the tendency of our brain to rely on numbers we already know when evaluating some unknown information. It is amazing that the principle works even in cases where the numbers belong to completely different categories of information. For example, as in the famous experiment by A. Tversky and D. Kahneman, when two groups of subjects were asked to recall the number of African countries in the UN, having initially watched the spin and stop of a roulette wheel (in which a stop was laid at one of two fixed values). In this case, the first group was shown the number 65 before the question, and the second - 10. Not having an exact idea of the number of African countries in the UN, representatives of the first group named a number around 45, and the second group - 10. Thus, the number initially shown to the participants of the experiment influenced the subsequent assessments of the respondents.
Later, in the 1970s, renowned scientists Amos egypt mobile database Tversky and Daniel Kahneman theorized the anchoring heuristic. In their experiments, they concluded that the number initially presented to a person affects the perception of all other values. It was this feature of our consciousness that Steve Jobs used in his iPad presentation.
The anchoring principle is the tendency of our brain to rely on numbers we already know when evaluating some unknown information. It is amazing that the principle works even in cases where the numbers belong to completely different categories of information. For example, as in the famous experiment by A. Tversky and D. Kahneman, when two groups of subjects were asked to recall the number of African countries in the UN, having initially watched the spin and stop of a roulette wheel (in which a stop was laid at one of two fixed values). In this case, the first group was shown the number 65 before the question, and the second - 10. Not having an exact idea of the number of African countries in the UN, representatives of the first group named a number around 45, and the second group - 10. Thus, the number initially shown to the participants of the experiment influenced the subsequent assessments of the respondents.