Decision making
Anchoring Effect
An initial numeric or categorical reference can pull later estimates and judgments toward it, even when adjustment should be larger.
Scientific category · 13 concepts
Research on how framing, defaults, reference points, ownership, and choice structure influence judgment and selection.
Questions this category answers
Research context: Behavioral economics, judgment, and decision science
Reference set
Decision making
An initial numeric or categorical reference can pull later estimates and judgments toward it, even when adjustment should be larger.
Decision making
Large or difficult choice sets can reduce decision confidence or action when options are hard to compare and preferences are uncertain.
Decision making
Cognitive bias is an umbrella term for systematic patterns in judgment that can depart from a task-relevant normative standard.
Decision making
Adding an option that is clearly worse than one target option on relevant attributes can shift preference toward that target.
Decision making
A preselected or no-action option is often chosen more frequently than an otherwise comparable alternative.
Decision making
Ownership or a sense of possession can increase the value assigned to an item relative to the value assigned before ownership.
Decision making
Choices can change when equivalent outcomes are described through different gain, loss, survival, or mortality frames.
Decision making
In practiced choice-reaction tasks, response time tends to grow with the information uncertainty of the possible stimulus-response alternatives.
Decision making
In many risky choices, losses relative to a reference point influence value more strongly than comparable gains, with magnitude varying by context.
Decision making
Outcomes are often unevenly distributed, so a minority of causes, tasks, or defects may account for a large share of observed impact.
Decision making
People often stop searching when they encounter an option that meets an acceptable threshold rather than exhaustively finding the theoretical optimum.
Decision making
Detection depends on both sensitivity to signal versus noise and a decision criterion that trades misses against false alarms.
Decision making
People may prefer an existing state or previously chosen option beyond what its attributes alone would predict.