Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases: Biases in judgments reveal some heuristics of thinking under uncertainty. science, 185(4157), 1124-1131.
Summary
While this paper refers to both representativeness and availability, these are treated elsewhere in more depth (respectively here and here). A new heuristic is introduced in this paper - anchoring. When making estimates, people generally start from an initial value, whether reached through suggestion or through computation, and then adjust from it. This initial value is known as an anchor. Anchors are especially sticky cognitively. For example, an experiment was run asking participants the percentage of African countries in the UN. An anchor was provided by a spinning wheel of fortune, and made salient by asking if their guess was higher or lower than the random number. The manipulation pronounced a significant result - “the median estimates of the percentage of African countries in the United Nations were 25 and 45 for groups that received 10 and 65, respectively, as starting points [anchors.” The stickiness generally results in insufficient adjustment from the anchor. In this paper, anchoring is generally conceptualized as a quantitative phenomenon in response to numerical stimuli.
Application
This would be a good paper to assign to a class to introduce them to these 3 heuristics. Anchoring has important application to negotiations. For future research, it would be interesting to look into the relationship between priming and anchoring? Priming seems to not replicate well, while anchoring seems fairly robust.
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