Danny and Amos asked their subjects to spin a wheel of fortune with slots on it that were numbered 0 through 100. Then they asked the subjects to estimate the percentage of African countries in the United Nations. The people who spun a higher number on the wheel tended to guess that a higher percentage of the United Nations consisted of African countries than did those for whom the needle landed on a lower number. What was going on here? Was anchoring a heuristic, the way that representativeness and availability were heuristics? Was it a shortcut that people used, in effect, to answer to their
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