The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain

by Daniel Gardner

The Anchoring Rule can also be used to skew public opinion surveys to suit one’s purposes. Say you’re the head of an environmental group and you want to show that the public supports spending a considerable amount of money cleaning up a lake. You do this by conducting a survey that begins with a question about whether the respondent would be willing to contribute some money—say $200—to clean up the lake. Whether people say yes or no doesn’t matter. You’re asking this question only to get the figure $200 into people’s heads. It’s the next question that counts: You ask the respondent to estimate how much the average person would be willing to pay to clean up the lake. Thanks to the Anchoring Rule, you can be sure the respondent’s Gut will start at $200 and adjust downward, arriving at a figure that will still be higher than it would have been if that figure hadn’t been handed to Gut. In a study that did precisely this, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Jack Knetsch found that the average guess about how much people would be willing to pay to clean up the lake was $36. But in a second trial, the $200 figure was replaced with $25. When people were then asked how much others would be willing to pay to clean up the lake, the average guess was a mere $14. Thus a high anchoring number produced an average answer almost 150 percent greater than a low number. By now, the value of the Anchoring Rule to someone marketing fear should be obvious.