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The anchoring effect began as an observation in psychophysics, where people judging weights or light used the first and last stimuli as reference points. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed it in abstract reasoning: given five seconds to estimate 1 x 2 x 3 up to 8, people guessed a median of 512, while those shown the sequence from 8 down guessed 2,250, against a true answer of 40,320. A roulette wheel rigged to land on 10 or 65 shifted estimates of the share of African countries in the United Nations from 25 to 45 percent. Dan Ariely found that people with higher last two Social Security digits bid 60 to 120 percent more for items such as wine.

The effect is hard to escape. Absurd anchors of 9 and 140 still moved guesses of Gandhi’s age at death to 50 and 67, and warnings, cash rewards and a one-week delay did not remove it. The consider-the-opposite strategy is the method researchers found reliable. Explanations include anchoring and insufficient adjustment, selective accessibility and extremeness aversion. Real estate agents were as anchored as students yet denied it, sad people proved more susceptible, and in groups the first speaker sets the anchor.

• The Case-Shiller index’s two-year and nine-year highs anchor home price forecasts.
• Investors on app-based brokerages who start with a small first purchase tend to under-invest over time.
• Mixed-handed people, with greater interaction between brain hemispheres, show larger anchoring effects.
• A Poland and India study tied weaker anchoring to Poland’s higher uncertainty avoidance score.
• Precise asking prices such as $799,800 keep final deals closer to the anchor than round numbers like $800,000.