Anchor in the Mind

was definitely older. But I have to admit that I read an excellent glow in the dark book about her a few years back, titled Radioactive Marie and Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout, which, by the way, heading into Valentine's Day, it's an excellent Valentine's Day book to give somebody. Wait, hold on, so this is going to be about them, but it's glow in the dark signaling that the book is radio active and will poison

you and your fingers will fall off. And well, when you put it like that, it doesn't sound very romantic, but it's it's a it's a very romantic book. But I know I know from having read that that she she would live significantly longer than than her twenties. Well, okay, so most people probably do know that. But here here's another chance. Just guess what age she died. How old was Marie Curry when she died? And just think about it. This becomes a little harder for me because I have

I can clearly picture a photograph of her. I'm gonna say, very close. Marie Cury died in nineteen thirty four at the age of sixty six, So yeah, very close. Now you listening at home, how close were you? Did you overshoot? I assume not many people undershot the age. If you did, that's okay, no shame in it. I tried this on somebody yesterday and she guessed forty four. I did the same thing. I said, older, younger than seven? What's the age?

And when when I told her the answer that it was actually sixty six, the person I was talking to said, oh, well, I've seen pictures of her that looked older than that, but I guess I assumed it was from all the radiation. Okay, I see where you're going with this. Though, the the question you asked by putting twenty seven in there, you're you're you're sort of lowering their expectations. It could be, Yeah, maybe something's going on there. I've got another one for you.

When Sean Connery took a role in the film Highlander to the Quickening one of his finest choices, Yes, the planet's eist. When he took that role, what was his salary for the role? Was it more or less than thirty one million dollars? Okay, this one's tough for me because I love movie trivia, but I'm not very good with the economic movie trivia, so I don't even have a very good starting point. It seems to me, though, that sounds like an awful lot of money. Um, especially

for Highlander two. Yeah, Like that's that's some that's some big Uh. That's that's some Tom Cruise money right there, I would guess. So you're saying lower maybe, But then this was you have to put yourself in a pre Highland or two era, So Highlander two can't imagine it, unable to process, cannot compute. It's It's true. I don't think I watched Highlander. I got excited to watch Highlander one after I saw trailers for Highlander two. I believe

that's how that went down. But yeah, not not knowing what we know now about the the the public reception, uh to to Highlander two, one could easily say, yeah it was everyone was just totally optimistic. It was a follow up to Highlander, which was arguably, you know, one of the greatest films of its generation. Okay, so guess taking out what was his actual salary? All right, you're asking about thirty five one I'm going to have that and say fifteen million? Is that a lot for Sean Connery? Oh?

Your way over the mark. Now, I do have to admit that my answer comes from a sketchy looking website, which is the only place I could find an answer called like the movie time. So maybe this is wrong, but the answer I could find said he was paid three point five million. Okay, well, yeah I was way over the line. Then yeah, but worth every penny really and then some exactly right. But notice how far off the mark you were given those starting questions. I asked,

was she older, younger than twenty seven? Or was it more or less than thirty one million? And I wonder to what extent those questions changed the kind of answer you gave to your ultimate guests on her age at death or on the movie salary? What would you have said if you hadn't received those questions to start with? Well, in the case of the Highlander question, I was just

kind of trying to reverse engineer and answer. I think I would have I still would have missed the mark, but I think I would have probably said something like five or six million, a lot closer, A lot closer, certainly less of an exaggeration, but the but but but you were pretty much on the money on Murray Curry, right, So yeah, but but that was an area where I I have read about her and I think I did a podcast that talked about her a while back, so I had some sort of I had some level of

expert information there, but I had nothing really to go on for the Highland or two one. Okay. So this effect that we've just been demonstrating is what we're going to be talking about today. And this is a psychological effect.

It's been written about a lot in the field of behavioral economics, but it's fundamentally a psychological phenomenon known as the anchoring bias, and I would argue it's one of the most powerful, most well known, and most easily exploited vulnerabilities in our minds, and for that reason, I think it's something that really everybody should know about, because it's something that people will constantly be using to try to get the per hand on you for the rest of

your life. Indeed, this is definitely a topic that will change the way you think about everything from salary negotiations to just haggling at the market totally. Yeah. Uh, and not just economic matters too, I want to uh, though it's mostly been tested in terms of estimating numbers, and especially economic type numbers, prices, things where you're trying to

determine a reasonable figure for something. I would posit that I think it's very likely this type of thinking also biases all kinds of judgments we make, such as judgments of people's reputations, judgments of the confidence we place in the outcomes of events, all of which is going to be enormously important for the rest of your life in myriad ways. Yeah. Though certainly a lot of the more like readily available examples are gonna involve economics. They're gonna

involve things like massive discounts. How can you do you remember deep discount vds? Deep discount DVDs or I guess it was deep discount DVD. I think it was a website that had it's time in the sun there with with deeply discounted DVDs. And it seems like everybody I knew we were just like, oh my goodness, these deals are too good. You're practically you're losing money if you don't order these movies. Right. The more you buy, the more you save. And it's easy to fall into that mentality.

It's like I didn't really want to pick up this video game or this movie or this book, but when you slice the price that much, I guess I'll bite. Yeah, man, seems irrational, right. But back to the questions I asked earlier, what what age did Marie Curry die? How much was Sean Connery paid for Highlander two? I actually did a brief, non scientific email survey. I say non scientific because these

were very small samples, not truly random. I just basically randomly emailed coworkers UH in two different groups and asked them to estimate answers to those questions. Now, I had Group A where I just asked them how old did you think Marie Curry was when she died? And how much do you think Sean Connery got paid for highland

Er two? No anchors, right, no starting numbers higher or lower than And in that group, the average answer that people gave was that they thought that Marie Cury died at fifty three, and they thought that Sean Connery got paid three point two million. Three point that was there. That was their answer, without any anchoring, right, without any anchoring. So that's very close, very close to the three point five if that website is correct. Who knows? Then Group B,

I did the same anchors I just gave you. So I asked them, did she die older? Younger than twenty seven? What age did she die? The average answer for that group was forty eight point three good bit lower than yeah. And then also I did the same thing, I said, uh, higher or lower than thirty one million for Sean Connery. Average guests in Group B was that Sean Connery got paid nineteen point three million dollars uncle that I wasn't alone to be for Islander to nineteen point three million.

And these are these are co workers, These are smart people, you know, they should be good at making estimates of these kind of things off the top of their head. But in this non scientific way, I feel like we've just demonstrated that just putting a number out there, even if the number is totally unreasonable, and Mary cuy didn't die at twenty seven, what Sean Connery did not get thirty one million for this movie in that doesn't make

any sense. But even if you put these unreasonable numbers out there, they seem to bias people's answers toward the numbers you've thrown out. Well, it really takes me back to like pop quizzes in grade school tests, right, and the saying the famous adage the answer is in the question, Because what do you do if you don't really know the answer? Will you have? It's multiple choice? You look at the available answers and answers and see which one each is out to you the most, which one feels

true or stirs your memory? And then failing that, you look to the question itself. Is there some sort of information in the question? Uh? Essentially you're looking for like a leak in the question. You're looking for a flaw in the in the Riddler's strategy. Yeah, there's test taking skills,

which are essentially meta test taking skills. They are skills that are not really about the subject of the test, but skills at determining how to interrogate the style and format of a test to exploit it for better scores in the end. Right. But then I also think there's there's also kind of a social connotation to this as well. Like an example would be, you have a friend who comes up and says, hey, man, have you heard this latest album by I don't know name an active band

Kansas Kansas. Have you heard this new album by Kansas? How awesome is that album? Man? So now I have to I have to frame my answer around awesome? Is it pretty awesome? Super awesome? It was okay, reasonably awesome. When you say it was okay, what that means is you hated it, But you have to adjust up to the fact that they started with how awesome is it? Right?

And this is a case though, where it's it's not a situation where you're gonna appear stupid or or uninformed on a topic unless you know, except on the topic of Kansas. Maybe it's not a situation where you have any monetary steaks, but there is kind of like a social steak employ there. If your friend is a huge Kansas fan. You don't want to say, oh, I think Kansas is awful. You want to adjust your answer so

that it's the appropriate balance of truth and uh in politeness. Yeah, So, in the same way that my email survey was not really scientific, what we're talking about. These examples are not

really scientific either. They're just anecdotes, and they've got all these contaminating factors like you're saying Kansas, well, like social social dynamics, like you were just explaining, so you respond, it might not be truly influenced by just the presence of the word awesome as much as it is by the fact that you're trying to maintain a relationship with the person who said this, you know what I mean.

So it's not divorced of this contaminating context. Now, the anchoring effect that we're going to be talking about today has been thoroughly demonstrated in fully scientific context, So it's not always just this social kind of stuff going on. Uh. You can test it ten ways to Sunday, and it has been tested not just ten a million ways to Sunday, and this thing works. This anchoring effect is a known robust exploit of the human mind that works almost all

the time it is. It is scary how often it works. Yeah, there are no shortage of papers about this. Uh, that's for sure. Now, I guess we should try to define it just a little bit more so to define the anchoring effect. It is an example of what's known as a cognitive heuristic. And if you're like me, I can remember. I think back when I was in college, I went a long time hearing the word heuristic and just sort

of nodding without really knowing what it meant. Anytime you hear the word heuristic, you can just substitute the phrase rule of thumb or mental shortcut. I still picture a hair shirt, no matter what I mean. Cans like that because you just kind of you ever have words like that where it's completely illogical, but you can't help but picture this thing in your head. I have no idea why, like I tend to imagine a philosopher in a hair shirt.

Melissandra put on her rough spun heuristic pretty much. But in reality, a heuristic is a rule of thumb or a mental shortcut. It's essentially a fast and easy process that your brain uses to come up with some kind of output. You need a piece of information or a judgment about something, and you don't really have time to sit down and work out all the details, so instead you use a heuristic. And heuristics can lead to relatively

good output. Sometimes you're good it at a fast and loose judgment on the fly, or they can lead to relatively bad output. And there are all kinds of heuristics we use. One example of an extremely common and extremely bad heuristic is judging some what you think of somebody by how they look. Extremely common heuristic. It's a shortcut. You don't want to do the work of like talking to them for hours and figuring out, you know, what you really think about them and their reliability as a

person and their values and all that. So instead you can just look at them and make a crude judgment. This is a great example because it's also a process that is not necessarily taking place at the surface level of of cognition. It's implicit as opposed to explicit. Yeah, it very often is. And so this is like one of these really bad heuristics that we're just plagued by. Uh, you know, it's everybody should recognize it's a destructive way

of thinking that it's not really good for society. That people do it, but people just keep doing it because they're naturally vulnerable to it. It's like taking a short cut through the woods. It makes sense unless there's a monster there, or it's rain or you get lost. Um. I mean really, that can be said about a lot of shortcuts. So when we call them shortcuts, they can

help you help you out in the short term. But if everybody does it, it breaks the system, or if you do it too often, you're more likely to run up against the pitfalls of taking that shortcut. Another bad heuristic, of course, is the anchoring heuristic, the one we're talking about today. Uh. It might not be bad in every single case, because maybe in some off chance it will

bias you toward a correct answer. But most of the time, the way the anchoring heuristic is going to be deployed in your life is by people who are trying to get you negotiated toward their position on something, and they will use the anchoring bias in order to exploit your mind and make you come closer to a position that benefits them. Right. So again, this is haggling for something

at a marketplace. This is negotiations over a contract. After what have you exactly right, So I think we should take a quick break, and then when we come back we will discuss the origins of the idea of anchoring and some research in psychology and behavioral economics on how

it applies. Thank alright, we're back. I should mention that one of our main resources in discussing the anchoring effect is a two thousand eleven literature review from the Journal of Socioeconomics by Adrian Fernham and Hua Cheu Boo, which collects and synthesizes all of the major research on the subject over the past forty years or so up until about two thousand eleven. This paper is a great resource. It puts it all in one place, and so that's going to be sort of our guide for discussing it

as we go. One question is where does the idea of anchoring come from. Obviously people have been using it before it was understood and codified as a principle in behavioral economics, right, But the anchoring and adjustment effect was most influentially described and articulated by Tversky and Conomon in nineteen seventy four, and according to them, it is quote the disproportionate influence on decision makers to make judgments that

are biased toward and initially presented value. So what that means, in effect, is that when we're trying to make a reasonable guess or a judgment about something, any piece of information you get before you make the judgment is likely to bias your thinking in the direction of that piece of information. So, if you're shown a car and asked how much you would pay for it, you you might say, what, I don't know, ten thousand dollars. That seems about right.

But let's say instead you are shown the same car with the price sticker on it that says sixteen thousand dollars. According to the anchoring and adjustment hypothesis here, you would be more likely in this scenario to offer more for the car, more than you would have if you just saw the car and tried to think, how much would that be worth to me? Because now, oh, now that it has a sixteen thousand dollar price tag, I think

maybe it looks worth about twelve thousand. You're still coming down from the offer, but the offer has biased up your initial judgment of how much it's worth, or, in other words, the anchor of the initial price has adjusted your offer higher than you naturally be willing to pay if that price hadn't been presented to you. It's kind of like if you have a ticket for a concert and then you realize you can't go, and so you try to sell that ticket, just you know, online to

some friends. Maybe you'll often include how much you paid for it and and what you're really saying there is I paid thirty bucks for this ticket, so I'll take whatever I can get. But either closer you get to thirty the better. You're not a Yeah, you're not asking how much is it worth for you to see Kansas. You're saying, given that I paid five hundred dollars for front row seats to Kansas, how close can you get to that that number. I have no idea how much

Kansas tickets actually cost. I assume their mega and demand. But by simply mentioning five hundred dollars, you made me think about anything. Well, you know they're Kansas. I I know of Kansas, so they're a big enough name. Uh, it makes sense that someone would pay a lot of money for a first row experience. You know, we're dust in the wind, we only live once. You might as

well go see Kansas, even if it costs a pretty penny. Yeah, it's crazy, Like you said, just how just through observation you can tell how powerful this this, the anchoring phenomenon. It actually is right, But we don't have to go anecdotal because this has been proved up down, left, right, sideways to Wichita and back. Uh. It is a thoroughly, thoroughly demonstrated principle. Our minds just work this way, and

so there are some qualifications. The anchoring bias can be affected by some variables, we think, and there is actually debate over what explains the reason behind it, why it happens in different scenarios. But what there's really no debating is that it happens. This is This has proven a million ways, and it is. It is considered a thoroughly robust bias and a fundamental part of how the human brain works. Yes, as you said, it said there are

no shortage of papers to back this up. I would say that one of the problems is that these are some of the stuffiest academic papers you could hope to read. I mean, they're they're breaking apart a phenomenous best studied through numbers and figures and estimates on value. So it's not as sexy as you have somebody in a room pulling a lever to shock somebody in the next room.

You know. I feel like maybe maybe what anchoring needs is like one really good but kind of superficial study that's just based on saying, how much do you think Tom Cruise was paid for this film? Something that will get that will generate headlines that will be uh relatable in a slightly different way, and that could help explain anchoring more to the general public. Yeah, it's like a

popular sensational demons stration, but it's been demonsted. I mean, part of the problem is you don't need to demonstrate it anymore. It's been demonstrated with these like hundreds of questions. It's been demonstrated on right, what is the freezing point of vodka? That's one that they ask people. Uh makes a difference there. What is the height of Mount Everest? Uh? What age was Amelia Earhart when she disappeared attempting to

pilot a plane around the world. So they're just all these studies that ask questions like this and use anchoring to bias the answers of participants. But it also works in things other than just like giving a basic informational guess about something. That's what we've been doing so far, Like you know, can you guess a fact about history? It also works in contexts like what percent chance would

you give of a thing happening? What's the percent chance you would give of a certain athlete scoring a certain number of points in an upcoming game. So it influences our judgments of probabilities. Yes, we certainly see this in political elections, for instance, Absolutely numbers thrown out what are the chances of this particular candidate winning, and then you end up adjusting your expectations of the future based on those percentages. Yeah, and so those percentages could be based

on something in reality. I mean, like if you're looking at good, well conducted poll data that's reflecting information about reality that you might want to adjust according to that, right, if it's good information. But somebody could also bias you with bad information, uh, just by using the anchoring effect. If they just put a ridiculous number that's not true in front of your face, chances are that this will actually influence the extent to which will influence your self

synthesized probability judgment. Yeah, Like there's I say, there's a poll that comes out and says, of wizards think Voldemort, it will be a great ruler of the Earth, you know, and then you're like, well, who, I don't know, is kind of high. It's probably more like sixty, right when when really most wizards, maybe of wizards think Baltimore is great. I don't know. I leave that to the the Potter fans. Yeah, I don't know what the percent is, but yeah, you

could be anchored and biased that way. So it affects these probability estimates. I know one thing they tested it on was like likelihood estimates of nuclear war. You can bias people's answers with anchors there. It has been shown to influence legal judgments like sentencing and uh and liability for punitive damages. It's been shown to influence this is a huge one, valuations and prices, right, how much you'd

be willing to pay for something. That's a really common example. Uh, it would be it's been used in in forecasting examples like how much you would expect to spend on a restaurant. And here's a really weird thing. The types of anchors that influence people don't have to seem credible. People can be influenced. These studies have shown by things that obviously shouldn't be influences. They don't have to like frame this, uh, this anchoring number that they prime you with as coming

from some reasonable authority or something like that. They can just prime you with a random number that doesn't matter at all. Some studies have people spinning a wheel to get a random number, and the random number still biases your answer toward it. So just a random approval rating for Boltimore, I could say, even though it's super high

approval rating among wizards of Baltimore. Apparently you could spin a wheel in front of people so that it's entirely clear to them that the number is random and you're it's not coming from real data, and still showing that higher number from the random spin of the wheel would bias people's estimates towards the number. But we're getting ahead of ourselves, because I think we should take a moment to talk about the different theories about what explained means

the anchoring effect. Obviously, this thing's there. If you put a number in front of somebody's face, it's going to bias their estimate or their answer towards that number. But why does this happen now we mentioned the idea was very popularly explained by Knomon and Diverseki in nineteen seventy four, and their original proposal of adjustment was was going up or down from a given anchor. And so their idea was you start with the anchor when you're trying to

reason out the answer to something. So I say, you know, what was Sean Connery's salary in uh in Highland or two? Was it thirty one million or or above or below? The way people reason about that is they'd start with thirty one million, and they'd say is that reasonable? And then most people would say, no, it can't be that much. So then they'd work their way down from thirty one

million to a place that starts to feel reasonable. And so in that sense, you're sort of biasing yourself up towards like the the utter top range of whatever you might consider a reasonable range of answers. Does that make sense? Yes, yeah, definitely. But this explanation does have problems. People have attacked it in the literature because anchoring, for one thing, is often shown to be unconscious. So if you're not doing this consciously, it's kind of hard to explain how that whole process

could work itself out. Now that's not to say that it's it's not ever conscious, because clearly, if someone's going into negotiations of a price, you might go into it saying I paid thirty dollars for this ticket. If I could get forty, that would be great. So I'm gonna start at forty knowing that they'll work me down closer to what I actually expect to get. Yeah, you're totally right.

Sometimes it clearly is conscious, And in those conscious scenarios, I think Conomon in Tversky's explanation might be right on the money. But uh, it also in some cases is clearly unconscious. And also it affects judgment whether or not the anchor is anywhere close to the realm of a reasonable range. So if I said, um, uh Sean Connery's was was Sean Connery's salary in Highlander to the quickening, uh eight million dollars? Or if I said, was it

ten billion dollars? Either way, that kind of thing has been shown to influence to bias your answer toward it. So whether it's within a somewhat reasonable range or not. Yeah, and if you throw it throughout one of those Uh, those figures, I'm thinking it's either exceedingly high or it's it's pretty small for Sean Connery. Like if you, if you'd if you'd asked me, did Sean Connery receive less or more than a hundred dollars for his role in

in Highland or two? That would make me begin to think, well, maybe he was paid of an exceedingly small amount of money and it was there was some sort of special studio deal about it, or he just did it for the love of the franchise. Yeah, he just wanted to support Highlander. He said, I'll to just take fifty thousand, that's all I need. Uh Yeah, that would still bias you way down from the true answer. Now, a different hypothesis for explaining what causes the anchoring effect is something

that we're all very familiar with. It's often called the selective accessibility hypothesis, but really this is just explaining the anchoring effect through confirmatory hypothesis testing a k A. Confirmation bias. Oh yes, this is a big one. This is like the bugbear of scientific study or just critical thinking exactly. So in this in this format, when you're trying to find the answer to a question, you mainly seek reasons

to justify belief in the answer you already suspect. So if a detective is trying to solve a murder and he's got a gut feeling that Eugene did it, he's going to unconsciously give greater weight to any piece of evidence that makes Eugene look more guilty, and unconsciously ignore or give less weight to evidence that points to somebody

else or exonerates Eugene. So instead of openly and inductively just gathering evidence for all possibilities, he's subconsciously, without realizing it, trying to build a case for the suspect he already hypothesizes to be guilty. Uh. Confirmation bias. Another way of explaining it is that a lot of times when we think we're working like an investigator, we're really working like

a prosecutor. Right. Uh. An example that's come up recently on the podcast is is that of scientific studies into the effectiveness of prayer, right, because it's you can see how it's easy for an individual to go into this thinking that they are being completely objective, but if they if part of their worldview, even if it's not, even

if they're not just like a hardcore believer. Now, if it's a part of their past, if it's a part of their history, Uh, then that could be a stumbling block to like true objective exploration of prayer as having some sort of an influence on the real world. Yeah, but of course we we would. We should say that this doesn't mean things like prayer studies are do because you can certainly design I mean, this is what science

is for. This is why you design experiments. You try to make them so that your your biases don't matter. You structure an experiment to try to exclude the possibility of your bias interfering with the results. But I think that the other takeaway here is that there are there are two types of bad prayer researchers. Essentially, there's the researcher who is just objectively bad, that is saying, I believe prayer is real and I'm going to I'm gonna bend and break every rule to quote unquote prove it

in the study. And I think though that sort of researcher tends to not exist. But then there's the second level, and that's the individual who if you ask them about it, if you were able to peer into their mind. They believe they are doing the objective thing. They honestly think they're doing a good job, probably, but they are still leaning into their bias. Yeah, they're prosecuting the truth rather

than than investigating all open possibilities. Uh. Yeah. But then again, like I said, I don't want to automatically tar anybody who does a prayer study with that, but that clearly is probably happening in some cases. Yeah. But the prosecution example is great too because it brings up the idea of leading questions, and the anchoring seems to indicate that any question with a with a figure in it, with with some sort of a number in it is kind of a leading question if I'm giving you a starting

point for you to determine the value. Yeah, exactly. I mean that that is, you could say that leading questions are something similar to the anchoring effect. You're trying to give people a place to work from in the content of the question. Now there's a third explanation for how

the anchoring effect works. Apart from the anchoring an adjustment theory of Konomon and Tversky, and apart from the confirmation bias or selective accessibility model and The third one is often known as the attitude change model, and this uh to think about the simple version of this. Essentially, in the attitude change model, the anchor is treated as something that changes your attitude towards the nature of the question. In other words, the anchor is treated as a kind

of hint. Now, a lot of people might have reacted to the stuff I said at the beginning of the episode that way, like, oh, if you said, um, you know, did Marie Cury live till after? She probably lived more than that. But I bet that is like a cue or a hint that she died young. Does that make sense? No, I think that makes perfect sense. I think that is. That is the way I tend to think about trivia questions if one's pulling out some trivia cards just you know,

with friends or family. Like one example, there's a wonderful little card game called are You Smarter Than a Box of Rocks? And it's each trivia question the answer is going to be zero, one or two, and you shake a box of rocks, and the answers will will be based on the random way that the rocks of fall together a zero one or two, so that you're playing against a box of rocks. But you go into every question knowing that the answer is going to be low.

It cannot be greater than two, right, So in that case, you are being primed with an anchor each time you play with something that is informationally relevant, like it actually is that that is useful information that's going to buy us your answer toward correct answers. But in the case of anchoring, there is plenty of evidence that you can bias people's answers towards incorrect answers. Obviously incorrect answers answers they would never give unless they've been given this anchor

before making the judgment. You know. Another area I think we were one running runs into this a lot, uh is the area of star ratings for things. You know, if you see a five star rating for a particular service, podcast, movie, book, game, you name it, uh, that is going to serve as an as an anchoring point for your evaluation of the

product or one star. Yeah, well I think that they're they're clearly is for example, a critical hurting effect about if you look at the way critics opinions pour in for movies and video games and things like that, especially any system maybe less so for things like books where there's not as much of an organized numerical rating system that people use. But yeah, for like movies, the Rotten

Tomatoes score or whatever. I do really get the feeling that once you've seen that lots of other critics like something, you're more likely to give it a fair shake. Like you might just pay more attention when you're watching it and think, Okay, this is something interesting going on here. You might have watched the same movie otherwise and just kind of been checking your phone and I was like, oh,

it was okay. Yeah, And it kind of opens your mind to the possibility for wonder um in something which it in something that is his low stakes this film for most of us, you know, unless you're a perfec national um in the in the industry for the most part, Like that's a good thing. Why I'm all for finding the wonder in a terrible film. Uh, But when you apply that to other areas, to find the wonder in a terrible automobile, to find the wonder in a terrible

political candidate like that, the stakes are higher. I'm a I'm a real devotee of cult b cars. We need like a mystery science theater of household appliances. Yeah, that the silhouettes are all missing fingers in that in that example. Okay, I guess we should move on to and we're still working mainly from that two thousand eleven paper I mentioned earlier. Uh to mention a few of the factors that have been found to affect or influence the anchoring effect, one

of which is mood. I thought this was kind of interesting because it actually runs counter to some of the ways that mood affects other types of judgment. Here's how it goes. Being sad has been found to generally make you more susceptible to anchoring. This is odd because the general understanding is that people reason better when they're in

a sad mood than when they're in a happy mood. Yeah, it's kind of the idea you want your shoppers happy, right, Like a happy shopper is gonna enter and leave with a smile on their face. But this makes it sound like the opposite that you want sad shoppers. Yeah. Despite the fact that information is generally processed more efficiently when judges are in a sad mood. Uh, This it's the opposite for the anchoring effect. To quote from the paper

I mentioned the two eleven paper quote. However, an exception to this rule is judgmental anchoring. Bowdenhausen and Englick and Soda found that participants in a sad mood were more susceptible to the heuristic bias of anchoring in comparison to

their counterparts in a neutral or happy mood. From the attitude change perspective, sad mood causes people to engage in more effortful processing, where people interpret information through elaboration on their existing knowledge and determine the claim to be acceptable or unacceptable. So maybe the idea here is that people in a sad mood are more likely to spend more time reading into the question on anchoring, doing that attitude change thing, looking for a hint in the question, and

this hint can bias them way off the mark. Okay, well what about the knowledge of the participants? This comes back to the to your initial question. Like I, I had read this book right, had researched this topic before, so I felt like I had a leg up on the question. Yeah, if you've just been reading about Marie Curry's life, you probably knew the right answer, and that

anchor wasn't going to throw you right. So there are some cases where obviously knowledge can play a difference, but in general, knowledge of a subject area has not been shown to be a strong way of undercutting the anchoring effect. Even if you're knowledgeable in a subject area, you're still susceptible all to anchoring. Examples that have been tested here are that, for example, car mechanics and car dealers were influenced by anchors on car prices. Estate agents adjust to

their estate value estimates towards anchors. Even if you know what you're talking about, anchors will probably still affect you. Huh. Well, I mean, on one level, this makes sense because there's we of course have the adage a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Uh And and certainly one can be knowledgeable in a field or or what not without being an expert in that area. There are gonna be holes

in your knowledge. There's gonna be room for doubt and uh and and that and where there's doubt, there seems like there's a susceptibility to anchoring. I'm sure that's not always the case, but I think sometimes you've got some sort of analog of the Dunning Kruger effect. Going on where people who have more knowledge are going to be a little more cautious people have less knowledge. You're just

kind of like, yeah, whatever, I'll give this answer. Well, I mean there's more room for ego to get involved to like take the the Highland or two question, as I said, trivia about the budget of a film or the growth of the film. Like, that's not an interest area for me, and I'm not I'm not really hesitant to be way off the mark on it. But if it were a question about like a particular actor in the film, like who played the villain in Highlander too,

which was because of course Michael Ironside. But if if that name wasn't instantly coming to my head, I would be less uh less brave about just blurting something out, you know, because this is something I should know. So I'm gonna be more cautious. Right. Well, the idea of ego does introduce something about motivation, right, You can have differential motivations and how you should try to answer questions. Maybe the problem is, um people just don't care enough

to really try to answers answer these questions. Right, So what happens if you give people incentives to get the answer right, The answer is not much. Incentives and pay off for accuracy have not been shown to correct the anchoring effect. People are still affected by anchors And of course this comes back to the idea that it is an implicit process. Yeah, exactly, here's one that should be a should be a total deal breaker. Here's how you

defeat the anchoring effect. Right for warning people, you say, there's this thing called the anchoring effect, and we're going to give you a number, and that number is probably going to contaminate, uh, the way in which you answer the question, So that number is going to bias your answer towards that number. Be aware of the anchoring effect. Unfortunately,

studies have shown this doesn't work. Even when you explain the anchoring effect to people and warn them that it may be biasing their thinking, they are still vulnerable to it. I want to try one out. This is just off off, just shooting from the hip. Here. How many dwarves are in the Disney movie Snow White in the seven Dwarves?

More or less than thirty eight? Like, just running it through my mind, I feel the contamination of that question, even though the answer is obvious, even though there should be no rational reason to gravitate towards thirty eight, it it begins to introduce like weeds of of doubt. Yeah, yeah, totally.

I mean in the same way that I don't know if you've ever had this experience of like reading a an obvious like fake news article on the internet, like somebody posts something it's like from a conspiracy theory website or you know, one of those fake news websites, or something that's just obviously made up, is not from a

reputable news source. Even though you know this is obviously untrue, you can kind of feel it's sort of like, yeah, creeping in this, like you don't have you don't you honestly put any credence in it being true, But just the fact that the words appear on the screen has some kind of like magical conjuring effect on your mind that makes you sort of start like entertaining doubts about reality.

Yeah yeah, no, I've I've felt the same thing. And you see that too with just straight up tabloid coverage and slanderous statements, like the mere fact that it is pumped into a headline gives it a certain life that it shouldn't have. Okay, but what about on the individual level. Are are some of it is just going to be more susceptible than others. Uh, it does appear by based on some preliminary research that that is the case. But this this is not as solid as some of the

other research. But preliminary research says that participants with high conscientiousness and that generally means things like self control and self discipline, and high agreeableness that's how long you how well you get along with others, and low extroversion meaning and people who are introverted. Those three things also coupled with high openness to experience, which these are all getting into the Big five personality traits, these things are are

more susceptible to the anchoring effect. But like I said, the study cautions that these are these are not super solid results. This is just sort of like something that appears to possibly be true. Now, the question would be why those traits, Why would those things lend lends susceptibility to the anchoring effect. To quote from the two thousand eleven study, quote, individuals with high conscientiousness engage in more

thorough thought processes before judgments are made. Those with high agreeableness take the provided anchors seriously, and high openness to experience influences individuals who are more sensitive to anchor cues. Also, they say that low extra version is possibly explained through a correlation with sad mood, which apparently increases susceptibility to the anchoring effect. As we explained earlier. Huh. Now, now the the openness, high openness to experience, that that rings

true from here as well. And I feel like I've seen that represented in other studies looking at you know, individuals with liberal or conservative viewpoints. Uh, someone might ask, or are you open to new experiences? I see you're into uh, you know, extreme sports and uh and and other new novel things in your life. Sure, well, are you open to the idea that Voldemort would make a great president and Harry Potter was a terrorist? And maybe

you are? You know, you're open to alternative viewpoints, alternative worldviews, right, And that kind of that kind of mind can be a dangerous thing because if you have a closed off mind, and it kind of runs both both ways, good information is not getting in, but also maybe bad information is less likely to get in. So so like I said that that that aspect of the argument, definitely I think rings true for me. Okay, here's another one. What about

analytical intelligence? Will people with just greater cognitive abilities be better at avoiding the effects of anchoring? Uh? This is one where research is divided on the topic, at least to the time this meta review is under it can there were conflicting results. Essentially, some studies seem to find that those with greater cognitive abilities were more resistant to anchoring,

and another study you found Nope, not the case. Okay, Well, I mean we've seen plenty of studies before that show that very intelligent people can be deceived and can be self deceiving. So it would make sense that you're, you know, cognitive level would only have so much influence on your

susceptibility to anchoring. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the things we talked about in our Science Communication Breakdown episode is that being a smart person does not necessarily protect you against radicalizing yourself with untrue beliefs on a partisan basis. Maria Kanakova has an entire book, UH dealing with with con artists, and one of her key points is it very intelligent people can be duped by things like this. Yeah, smart people are vulnerable to con artists she's got a

great story, and that it's not a great story. It's a sad story, but it's about like, what is it? A nuclear physicis cysts who gets taken in on this bizarre drug running scheme. Yes, I believe. So I have to revisit to make sure I got the details right. But that's a good book. Book. It's worth reading, by the way. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we'll give you a little advice on how to avoid the anchoring effect. All right,

we're back. So the question you're obviously wondering about is you We've gone through all these reasons that the anchoring effect appears incredibly robust, despite the fact that people want to be able to avoid it and not have it influenced their thinking, it just seems to work every time. Uh So, how do you get around it? Well, this comes up in uh in the two thousand eleven paper we've been discussing, and the results are not great. There

there is not a whole lot of hope to be offered. Um. One of the one of the strategies that has been put out there is something that might work is what's known as the consider the opposite strategy. Now, this is effective at some types of d biasing. De Biasing is the process of, you know, trying to remove your personal bias, and so consider the opposite strategies are Actually it seems

pretty simple, but it's worth learning how to do. When you think something is true, just sit there and come up with a list of reasons it might not be true. I think this is reasonable. Yeah, I mean a sort of a science fiction example would be Star Wars looking at the the the Empire. Is the Empire good or is the Empire bad? You're told that they're bad, but sometimes it's helpful to entertain the opposite viewpoint. Maybe the

Empire was good. I don't know what the arguments for that would be, but okay, I don't know if it holds up anymore, but I feel like there was a time when when the argument was more convincing, or at least I couldn't see that the Empire is good, but I could see that the rebellion is also evil. Yes, I could say that the Empire and the rebellion and

are both evil. Yeah. I feel like they're leaning into that more with the recent films, right, Maybe, I don't know But anyway, it comes back to a popular bit of advice that Timothy Leary gave everyone. Right. Yes, though a lot of people say that, and I think a lot of times they just think that means like, don't believe what the man tells. That is a part of it. But another very important part of thinking for yourself is questioning your internal authority, questioning what seems reasonable to you

at this moment. And a good way to do that, apparently is to try this consider the opposite strategy. Just honestly do your best to come up with a list of reasons why what you're thinking is probably wrong. And then you consider that list and you think about are these reasons reasonable? And so this this has been shown to be effective at some things, some types of debiasing, but apparently it is not shown to be very effective

with anchoring. Well that's not good at all. Nope. Another thing I want to read a quote from the paper. Quote in their popular book on behavioral economics, bell Ski and Golovich warned people that they may be prone to confirmation biases and anchoring if they make spending and investment decisions without research. They are especially loyal to certain brands

or investments for the wrong reasons. They find it hard to see investments for less than they paid for them, and they rely on the seller's price rather than assessing

the value themselves. They advise people to avoid the pitfall of anchoring by broadening their board of advisors, so listening to more people, doing more thorough research before making economic decisions, So not just relying on one anchor you're seeing in the store, but trying to get as much information in front of you as possible, looking at trends, being realistic and taking the longer view, and showing a little more

humility when it comes to one's own judgment. And now all of this seems like good advice to me, But I don't know if this actually proves effective at overcoming the anchoring bias, right, because in all of these cases, if you just had this this checklist in your pocket, you would still being You would still be employing it

explicitly trying to counter something that is occurring implicitly. Yeah, Now there are a few other ideas I was just thinking about that these are not tested, but I was trying to think, well, what could you do given how robust the anchoring effect is. Here's one whenever possible. What can you do to avoid the anchor? Like in situations where you're going to have to make a judgment and you know that you may be exposed to an anchor that works against you, just try to protect yourself from

being exposed to it. Do whatever you can to avoid actually encountering that anchor. Huh. Then this sounds like a potential role for a an Internet browser filter, like an anchor filter, where it will take out any any leading numbers and whatever you might be reading. Yeah, but then again, it's hard to know how to do that right, Like, you don't want to cut yourself off from incoming information that may actually be useful to you. True, and you

don't just remove all numbers from your news feed. That sounds a bit extreme. Yeah, here's another one that is much more, much more directly related to price negotiations. Uh, be preemptive, set your own anchor before you're a negotiating opponent has a chance to set an anchor for you. So, if you want to pay a lower price on something, apparently a good way to do that is you be the first person to say something and set your really

really really low estimate or high estimate. If you're looking right, if you're paid, if you're trying to get paid, Yeah, exactly, this sounds it sounds like the art of the deal right here. I don't think exactly is the art of the deal um, but yeah, you can use anchoring to your advantage. Most of the time people are going to be trying to use it against you, But there are cases where we're normal people who are not in advertising

or sales or whatever can try to use this. For example, studies have actually been conducted and found that when you if you're trying to get a higher salary at work, you're trying to negotiate your pay up. Uh, salary negotiations that open with a very high request are more likely to end up with a higher salary offer in the end, even if the opening anchor you request is way too high. So going to every negotiation saying thirty million dollars, just go for the Sean Connery money right off the bat.

I don't know if thirty million dollars, I mean, maybe it will. I don't know. Then again, I mean, I feel like if you're negotiating with a with a business person, they've probably been trained to some extent about some version of the anchoring effects. But then again, as we've discussed earlier, knowing that out, yeah, knowing about it doesn't make it not work on you. Hey, if you want to check out more Stuff to Bbow your Mind, head on over

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