You and several other people are sitting in a room. At the front of the room is a numbered game wheel, the kind you see at a fair. A man spins it. The wheel is rigged to stop on 65. You are not told this.
It stops on 65. The man asks everyone to write down that number. He then asks you to answer a few questions, including this one: “What percentage of UN member states are African?” [i]
The answer that you and the others give averages out to 45%. The average answer of a different group of people, who saw the wheel land on 10, was only 25%.
Really?
The wheel stopped on Resulting Estimate of African UN member states
65 45%
10 25%
Like most of us, you have a weakness in your thinking called anchoring. You can be influenced by an irrelevant number on a game wheel. Your logic about African states and the UN is psycho-logic.
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Disinterested speculation about the UN is one thing, but would anchoring ever affect an important personal decision? Yes. A woman whose maiden name is Brown is more likely to marry another Brown than a Smith or a Jones, despite the fact that there are more Smiths and Joneses out there. People are anchored to their own name. [ii]
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It’s not helpful to be influenced by irrelevant reference points. It’s just normal.
Your brain does a lot of work without asking your permission. It’s good that you don’t forget to breathe. But anchoring and other glitches in your automatic thinking weaken your common sense.
Here is a checklist to help you overcome these glitches and make better decisions right now.
Learn more about ways to be wrong to get yourself on the path to being right more often.
[i] What percentage of UN member states are African? Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011), 119–20. 130 [ii] People are anchored to their own name. Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012), 19.
