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You have to adjust in the appropriate direction by finding arguments to move away from the anchor.
you are likely to stop when you are no longer sure you should go farther—at the near edge of the region of uncertainty.
adjustment is a deliberate attempt to find reasons to move away from the anchor: people who are instructed to shake their head when they hear the anchor,
suggestion is a priming effect, which selectively evokes compatible evidence.
System 1 understands sentences by trying to make them true, and the selective activation of compatible thoughts produces a family of systematic errors
This is one of the manifestations of associative coherence that I described in the first part of the book.
The selective activation of compatible memories explains anchoring: the high and the low numbers activate different sets of ideas in memory.
The anchoring effect was above 30%, indicating that increasing the initial request by $100 brought a return of $30 in average willingness to pay.
anchors that are obviously random can be just as effective as potentially informative anchors. When
The conclusion is clear: anchors do not have their effects because people believe they are informative.
The psychological mechanisms that produce anchoring make us far more suggestible than most of us would want to be.
A few years ago, supermarket shoppers in Sioux City, Iowa, encountered a sales promotion for Campbell’s soup at about 10% off the regular price. On some days, a sign on the shelf said limit of 12 per person. On other days, the sign said no limit per person. Shoppers purchased an average of 7 cans when the limit was in force,
makes the first move by setting the list price. As in many other games, moving first is an advantage in single-issue negotiations—for example, when price is the only issue to be settled between a buyer and a seller.
Instead you should make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so, and make it clear—to yourself as well as to the other side—that you will not continue the negotiation with that number on the table.
They instructed negotiators to focus their attention and search their memory for arguments against the anchor. The
may be a good defense against anchoring effects, because it negates the biased recruitment of thoughts
Whether the story is true, or believable, matters little, if at all. The powerful effect of random anchors is an extreme case of this phenomenon, because a random anchor obviously
We defined the availability heuristic as the process of judging frequency by “the ease with which instances come to mind.”
You are therefore likely to exaggerate the frequency of both Hollywood divorces and political sex scandals.
Resisting this large collection of potential availability biases is possible, but tiresome. You must make the effort to reconsider your impressions and intuitions by asking such questions as, “Is our belief that thefts by teenagers are a major problem due to a few recent instances in our neighborhood?” or “Could it be that I feel no need to get a flu shot because none of my acquaintances got the flu last year?” Maintaining one’s vigilance against biases is a chore—but the chance to avoid a costly mistake is sometimes worth the effort. One of the best-known studies of availability suggests that
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I am generally not optimistic about the potential for personal control of biases, but this is an exception.
On the other hand, while the first three or four instances of your own assertiveness probably came easily to you, you almost certainly struggled to come up with the last few to complete a set of twelve; fluency was low. Which will count more—the amount retrieved or the ease and fluency of the retrieval? The contest yielded a clear-cut winner: people who had just listed twelve instances rated themselves as less assertive than people who had listed only six.
If you cannot easily come up with instances of meek behavior, you are likely to conclude that you are not meek at all. Self-ratings were dominated by the ease with which examples had come to mind. The experience of fluent retrieval of instances trumped the number retrieved.
believe that they use their bicycles less often after recalling many rather than few instances are less confident in a choice when they are asked to produce more arguments to support it
are less confident that an event was avoidable after listing more ways it could have been avoided are less impressed by a car after listing many of its advantages A professor at UCLA found an ingenious way to exploit the availability bias. He asked different groups of students to list ways to improve the course, and he varied the required number of improvements. As expected, the students who listed more ways to improve the class rated it higher!
Note that this inference rests on a surprise—fluency being worse than expected. The availability heuristic that the subjects apply is better described as an “unexplained unavailability” heuristic.
They evidently have expectations about the rate at which fluency decreases, and those expectations are wrong: the difficulty of coming up with new instances increases more rapidly than they expect.
System 2 can reset the expectations of System 1 on the fly, so that an event that would normally be surprising is now almost normal. Suppose you are told that the three-year-old boy who lives next door frequently wears a top hat in his stroller. You will be far less surprised when
Multiple lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that people who let themselves be guided by System 1 are more strongly susceptible to availability biases than others who are in a state of higher vigilance.
if they are knowledgeable novices on the topic of the task, in contrast to true experts
Victims and near victims are very concerned after a disaster. After each significant earthquake, Californians are for a while diligent in purchasing insurance and adopting measures of protection and mitigation.
However, the memories of the disaster dim over time, and so do worry and diligence.
The dynamics of memory help explain the recurrent cycles of disaster, concern, and growing complacency that are familiar to students of large-scale emergencies.
An inability to be guided by a “healthy fear” of bad consequences is a disastrous flaw.
Consistent affect is a central element of what I have called associative coherence.
observations that the public has a richer conception of risks than the experts do.
They comment that in the social context, “all heuristics are equal, but availability is more equal than the others.”
As Slovic has argued, the amount of concern is not adequately sensitive to the probability of harm; you are imagining the numerator—the tragic story you saw on the news—and not thinking about the denominator.
The proportion of marbles of a particular kind is called a base rate.
uncertain validity:
“anti-base-rate” character, a good fit to small fields and a poor fit to the most populated specialties.
Predicting by Representativeness
but anyone who ignores base rates and the quality of evidence in probability assessments will certainly make mistakes.
One of the easy answers is an automatic assessment of representativeness—routine in understanding language.
The players the A’s picked were inexpensive, because other teams had rejected them for not looking the part. The team soon achieved excellent results at low cost.
an excessive willingness to predict the occurrence of unlikely (low base-rate) events.
You surely understand in principle that worthless information should not be treated differently from a complete lack of information,
your System 1 will automatically process the information available as if it were true.
let your judgments of probability stay close to the base rate. Don’t expect this exercise of discipline to be easy—it requires a significant effort of self-monitoring and self-control.
“This start-up looks as if it could not fail, but the base rate of success in the industry is extremely low. How do we know this case is different?”
