Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms

by Hannah Fry

If you’ve ever convinced yourself that an extremely expensive item of clothing was good value just because it was 50 per cent off (as I regularly do), then you’ll know all about the so-called anchoring effect. We find it difficult to put numerical values on things, and are much more comfortable making comparisons between values than just coming up with a single value out of the blue. Marketers have been using the anchoring effect for years, not only to influence how highly we value certain items, but also to control the quantities of items we buy. Like those signs in supermarkets that say ‘Limit of 12 cans of soup per customer’. They aren’t designed to ward off soup fiends from buying up all the stock, as you might think. They exist to subtly manipulate your perception of how many cans of soup you need. The brain anchors with the number 12 and adjusts downwards. One study back in the 1990s showed that precisely such a sign could increase the average sale per customer from 3.3 tins of soup to 7.52 By now, you won’t be surprised to learn that judges are also susceptible to the anchoring effect. They’re more likely to award higher damages if the prosecution demands a high amount,53 and hand down a longer sentence if the prosecutor requests a harsher punishment.54 One study even showed that you could significantly influence the length of a sentence in a hypothetical case by having a journalist call the judge during a recess and subtly drop a suggested sentence into the convers...