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Let's do a simple psychological test.
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Do you think the average German car costs more than $90,000?
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That's the question Professor Michael Morris of Columbia University asked his class of MBA students in order to trick them using a phenomenon known as anchoring.
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Anchoring is a cognitive bias that makes you rely too heavily on the first piece of information presented, the anchor, no matter how arbitrary it may seem, it pulls your thoughts, judgments and decisions towards it.
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In negotiations, for example, priming the other party with an initial offer sets an anchor that can heavily influence the final outcome,
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even if both parties know that the initial offer is absurd, the final agreement often gravitates towards that first figure.
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In medicine, studies show that doctors are often overly influenced by the initial information they receive, which can lead to screening errors, a false diagnosis and the wrong treatment plan.
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Even the smartest among us, who are trying to arrive at a logical conclusion, have an intuition that has already been swayed by the anchor, which pulls our thoughts towards a biased conclusion.
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A fascinating experiment by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman first introduced the idea in 1971.
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The two psychologists asked people to spin a rigged wheel with numbers ranging from 1 to 100.
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Afterwards, participants were asked to estimate how many African countries were members of the United Nations.
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The result? Those who saw a high number on the spinning wheel gave much higher estimates than those who saw a low number.
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But does this work on Morris's smart MBA students?
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Before Professor Morris ran his experiment, he separated his students into two groups.
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One group was asked if they thought that the average German car from last year cost more than $90,000, while the other was asked if it cost more than 30,000.
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After doing this for many years, Professor Morris found that his students who were anchored by the $90,000 figure estimated the average price to be between $45,000 and $50,000,
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while those anchored by the $30,000 figure estimated it to be between $35,000 and $40,000.
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The anchors, regardless of the number, had pulled their judgments in that direction.
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Now, here's the kicker.
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When Morris asked his students to explain how they arrived at their conclusions, they claimed that they used their knowledge to make a rational estimate.
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Only when the professor dug deeper did one group mention high-end brands like Mercedes, while the other thought of more affordable cars like Volkswagen.
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It is as if the pictures that arrive in the students' heads when they are primed by the anchor decide where they land with their estimates.
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Intuition drives more than 90% of our thinking and behavior, Morris concluded.
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How did you answer? Were you influenced by our anchor at the beginning of the video to give estimates closer to $90,000, like the MBA students?
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Share your experiences with anchoring in the comments below.
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We relentlessly researched education for the past decade, read plenty of peer-reviewed papers, visited all sorts of schools, created hundreds of videos on the topic,
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and even set up our very own kindergarten for project-based learning, and now, we also made a book.
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The Unschooler's Educational Dictionary covers everything we know about learning, unveils the unintended consequences of compulsory education, and includes a complete guide to the alternative school movement.
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Order your copy now.
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Just visit your favorite bookshop or check the links in the description below.
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If you found this helpful, check out our other videos, join us on YouTube or on patreon.com/sprouts.
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For more information, classroom exercises or videos without background music, visit sproutsschools.com.
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Published under Creative Commons.
