Anchoring

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For other uses, see Anchor (disambiguation).

Anchoring or focalism is a term used in psychology to describe the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.

During normal decision making, individuals anchor, or overly rely, on specific information or a specific value and then adjust to that value to account for other elements of the circumstance. Usually once the anchor is set, there is a bias toward that value.

Take, for example, a person looking to buy a used car - they may focus excessively on the odometer reading and the year of the car, and use those criteria as a basis for evaluating the value of the car, rather than considering how well the engine or the transmission is maintained.

As a second example, consider an illustration presented by Daniel Kahneman.^{[citation needed]} An audience is first asked to think of the last 4 digits of their social security number, and then to estimate the number of physicians in New York. The correlation between an individual's social security number and their estimate is around 0.4—far beyond what would be expected by chance. The simple act of thinking of the first number strongly influences the second, even though there is no logical connection between them.

[edit] Anchoring and adjustment

Anchoring and adjustment is a psychological heuristic said to influence the way people assess probabilities intuitively. According to this heuristic, people start with an implicitly suggested reference point (the "anchor") and make adjustments to it to reach their estimate.

For instance, when asked to guess the percentage of African nations which are members of the United Nations, people who were first asked "Was it more or less than 45%?" guessed lower values than those who had been asked if it was more or less than 65%. The pattern has held in other experiments for a wide variety of different subjects of estimation. Others have suggested that anchoring and adjustment affects other kinds of estimates, like perceptions of fair prices and good deals.

These findings support the contention of some experts in negotiation that participants should begin from extreme initial positions. The anchoring and adjustment heuristic was first theorized by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.

[edit] Neuro-linguistic programming

Main article: Anchoring (NLP)

When the term anchoring is used in reference to neuro-linguistic programming, the term is describing a trigger (whether internal or external) that reflexively alters the state of mind. For example, a voice tonality that resembles the characteristics of one's perception of an "angry voice" may not actually be as a result of anger, but will usually trigger an emotional response in the person perceiving the tonality to have the traits of anger.

Anchors (used in this sense of the word) can come in several different forms: verbal phrases, physical touches or sensations, certain sights and sounds, and internal dialogue, just to name a few.