User:Pcprice28/Anchoring

User:HungryDesi/Visual cliff

Editing Plan
I am planning to rewrite the lead section of the article to give a clearer definition of anchoring and one or two simple examples. I am then planning to delete references to non-anchoring phenomena like priming effects, focalism, and so on. I am also planning to condense the section on negotiations. I will do all of this myself. I plan to add references to two classic books about judgment and decision making.

Tentative Lead Section
Anchoring is a cognitive bias where the presentation of an arbitrary number (often called an "anchor") affects a subsequent numerical judgment, such that the judgment is closer to the anchor than it otherwise would be. In the classic demonstration by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, people spun a wheel of fortune that landed on a seemingly random number from 0 to 100. Then they were asked if the percentage of African countries that were in the United Nations was greater or less than the number on the wheel. Unknown to the participants, the wheel was rigged to land on either 35 or 65. They found that when the wheel landed on the 35, the mean estimate was X%. But when it landed on 65, the mean estimate was Y%. This is referred to as anchoring because the arbitrary number was originally conceptualized as a kind of anchor that Later research suggested that similar effects can occur even in the absence of people comparing the target number to arbitrary number. For example, one study found that an arbitrary ID number affected people's estimates of the number of physicians in the phone book. It has been suggested that anchoring is relevant in many everyday contexts, including negotiations etc.