Does Anchoring Work In The Courtroom?
Anchoring is one of the most prevalent and enduring heuristics that decision-makers encounter in their daily lives and is particularly powerful when making decisions under uncertainty. An anchor is an initial reference point that has an outsized impact on how decision-makers interpret and encode subsequent information on the topic. And most strikingly, we struggle to overcome the anchor’s effect even when given incentives to do so or when made conscious of the resulting bias.
Anchoring: A Simple Example
Take for example a study where participants were asked to recall the last two digits of their social security number and then were subsequently asked to price a bottle of wine. You can already guess the outcome: those with social security numbers ending with high digits (think 70s, 80s, or 90s) were willing to pay more for the wine than those with social security numbers ending with lower digits.
References
“Coherent Arbitrariness”: Stable Demand Curves without Stable Preferences (2003) by Dan Ariely, George Loewenstein and Drazen Prelec
The More You Ask for, the More You Get: Anchoring in Personal Injury Verdicts (1996) by Gretchen B. Chapman & Brian H. Bornstein
Playing Dice With Criminal Sentences: The Influence of Irrelevant Anchors on Experts’ Judicial Decision Making (2006) by Birte Englich, Thomas Mussweiler, & Fritz Strack
The Anchoring Bias and Its Effect on Judges by Rod Hollier, https://www.thelawproject.com.au/insights/anchoring-bias-in-the-courtroom
About the Author
Tom Spiegler
Tom is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is interested in the intersection of decision-science and the law, with a focus on leveraging behavioral research to shape more effective public and legal policy. Tom graduated from Georgetown Law with honors. Prior to law school, Tom attended McGill University where he graduated with First Class Honors with majors in Philosophy and Psychology.
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