Anchoring Bias - The Decision Lab

Anchoring bias is a cognitive bias that causes us to rely too heavily on the first piece of information we are given about a topic.

The first mention of anchoring bias was in a 1958 study by Muzafer Sherif, Daniel Taub, and Carl Hovland.

The anchoring effect wasn’t conceptualized as bias that affected decision making until the late 1960s, and it wasn’t until the 1970s that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky introduced the anchor-and-adjust hypothesis in order to explain this phenomenon.

The anchoring effect is difficult (if not impossible) to completely avoid, but research shows that it can be reduced by considering reasons why the anchor doesn’t fit the situation well.