Anchoring is a particular form of priming effect whereby initial exposure to a number serves as a reference point and influences subsequent judgments. The process usually occurs without our awareness (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) and has been researched in many contexts, including probability estimates, legal judgments, forecasting and purchasing decisions (Furnham & Boo, 2011).
One experiment asked participants to write down the last three digits of their phone number multiplied by one thousand (e.g. 678 = 678,000). Results showed that people’s subsequent estimate of house prices were significantly influenced by the arbitrary anchor, even though they were given a 10 minute presentation on facts and figures from the housing market at the beginning of the study. In practice, anchoring effects are often less arbitrary, as evident the price of the first house shown to us by a real estate agent may serve as an anchor and influence perceptions of houses subsequently presented to us (as relatively cheap or expensive). Anchoring effects have also been shown in the consumer packaged goods category, whereby not only explicit slogans to buy more (e.g. “Buy 18 Snickers bars for your freezer”), but also purchase quantity limits (e.g. “limit of 12 per person”) or ‘expansion anchors’ (e.g. “101 uses!”) can increase purchase quantities (Wansink et al., 1998).
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References
Furnham, A., & Boo, H. C. (2011). A literature review of the anchoring effect. The Journal of Socio-Economics, 40(1), 35-42.
Scott, P. J., & Lizieri, C. 92012). Consumer house price judgments: New evidence of anchoring and arbitrary coherence. Journal of Property Research, 29, 49-68.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science (New Series), 185, 1124-1131.
Wansink, B., Kent, R. J., & Hoch, S. J. (1998). An anchoring and adjustment model of purchase quantity decisions. Journal of Marketing Research, 35(1), 71–81.