By Yiler Huang
Anchoring bias is a common subconscious thinking mistake that most people have fallen into in their life. When we are presented with new information, it often becomes our reference for similar information. It is widely seen in marketing, negotiating, debating etc. While some examples of anchoring bias are harmful, others won’t affect one’s life very much. In an attempt to observe this bias happening in real life, we designed a simple experiment.
This experiment took place in Taipei Yuanshan MRT station and the Expo park. Subjects on the street were presented with two pieces of paper with lines drawn on them. The first piece of paper had either a 10 centimeter (line A) or 90 centimeter (line B) line drawn on it. The subjects had a short time to memorize the length of the first piece of paper. They were then presented with another piece of paper that had a 60 centimeter line drawn on it (line C), and asked to guess the length of line C. The researcher believes that subjects who had line A shown to them would guess that line C was longer than 60 centimeters, and those who had line B shown to them would guess that line C was shorter than 60 centimeters. This is because line C appeared long in comparison with line A, and appeared short in comparison with line B.
The research team had collected data from 20 subjects. 10 of them were shown line A (group A) as the first line, and the other 10 were shown line B (group B). 1 outlier was removed, because they answered in feets instead of centimeters and the researcher was unsure if they were familiar with the metric system. Despite having a rather small sample size, some patterns could already be observed in the data. We could see that the average of group A and B’s answers were only 2 centimeters apart, which the researcher believed could not be considered as a significant difference. However, there seemed to be something more worth discussing about than the average. One interesting finding was that the answers from group A were all multiples of 10, and that a number of people from group B gave the answer of 45 centimeters. These two points will be further elaborate in the discussion section.
The researcher believed that anchoring bias could be observed in both groups. It didn’t affect the range of the answers from the subjects like the researcher expected, but it did act on the form of the answers they gave. From the points addressed in the data section of this article, we can see that group A tended to give answers that were multiples of 10, and a few respondents from group B guessed that line C was 45 centimeters long. The researcher assumed that this is related to the first line presented to the subjects for references. Because line A was 10 centimeters long, subjects from group A tended to use the multiple of 10 to assume the length of line C. The researcher also believed that 3 subjects from group B thought line C was 45 centimeters because it was exactly half of line B.
From this experiment, we could see that the existence of anchoring bias was proven by the data researchers collected. Though misleading people when guessing lengths of lines might not be a very practical application, this doesn’t mean anchoring bias couldn’t be used in other ways. In fact, it is already being used widely in business, marketing, social media, and other various media sources. Anchoring bias is no stranger to modern society, but it is still a fact that many people might ignore. The researcher believes that this article could act as a means to improve the awareness of the general public of the existence of anchoring bias.