Findings offer critical steps to better understanding the decision-making process
Numeric anchoring is a long-established technique of marketing communication. Once a price is mentioned, that number serves as the basis for – or “anchors” – all future discussions and decisions. But new research shows that this phenomenon is not limited to decisions that involve numbers, the use and understanding of which require high-level cognitive thinking. Anchoring also biases judgments at relatively low levels of cognition when no numbers are involved.
In research recently published in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Gaurav Jain, an assistant professor in the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, demonstrated that anchoring even occurs in perceptual domains, like sight, sound, and touch.