Anchoring Bias

Question 1

What are biases?

Answer 1

• Humans rely on intuitive thinking and take cognitive shortcuts resulting in a number of well-reserached biases.

Question 2

Define heuristics and outline their use.

Answer 2

A mental shortcut that allows people to solve problems and make judgements quickly and efficiently.

• Reduces mental effort needed to make decisions.
• Simplify complex and difficult questions.
• A fast and accurate way to arrive at a conclusion.
• Help with problem solving.

Question 3

Outline causes of cognitive bias.

Answer 3

• Limits on the mind’s attention.
• Mental shortcuts called ‘heuristics’.
• Individual motivations.
• Social pressure.
• Emotions.

Question 4

What is anchoring bias?

Answer 4

• The tedency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered (the ‘anchor’) when making decisions.
• During decision making, anchoring occurs when individuals use an initial piece of information to make subsequent judgements.

Question 5

Evaluate anchoring bias.

Answer 5

• Anchoring is only the result of conscious adjustment.
• Critics of the theory argue this is contradictory evidence for anchoring bias as a conscious adjustment does not account for anchoring bias observed in studies using subliminal anchors.
• Alternative explanation to anchoring is confirmatory hypothesis testing.

Question 6

Evaluate cognitive bias.

Answer 6

• Definition of biases are too vague to count as explanations.
• Heuristics is not a cognitive model and lacks scientific rigour as it is not falsifiable and does not account for the relationships between the various heuristics.
• As humans, we may be very good of explaining our thinking process.
• Based on the assumption that cognitive biases are universal.