A classical mental mechanism, called anchoring, seems to be at work here. You lower your anxiety about uncertainty by producing a number, then you “anchor” on it, like an object to hold on to in the middle of a vacuum.
ANCHORING: You produce a number and then hold on to it no matter how much the situation changes. Even if the number is originally expressed as a range, critics will judge based on the center of the range. The best thing to do is tell the critics to make up their own number. Perhaps a magic eightball would help.
