2023-08-14 11:00:09
Léa Girardot / The World
“1. Is a whale more or less than 49 meters long? » ; “2. How tall do you think a whale is? » : with the questions asked in this order, the guinea pigs of the psychology researchers Fritz Strack and Thomas Mussweiler answered, on average, that a whale was 60 meters long. On the other hand, when the second question was asked alone, the average of the answers fell to 30 meters.
The right answer ? Thirty meters for the tallest, but that’s not what matters to us here. This experiment highlights the anchoring bias: the data of the first question orients the reflection towards a scale of values and influences the answer given thereafter.
Admittedly, we rarely assess the size of a whale, but, in everyday life, this bias is omnipresent in our processing of information and alters our reasoning.
In another experiment conducted in Germany, some 40 judges were to decide on the sentence they were considering for a woman arrested for shoplifting. Before that, they had to roll two dice, which were loaded to consistently come up with a total of 3 or 9. The judges then had to say whether they would sentence the accused to a prison term that was higher or lower, in months, than the given number. by the dice. Finally, they were asked to specify the exact sentence they were considering. On average, those who scored a 9 sentenced her to eight months; those who had obtained a 3 leaned for five months. Experience shows that the anchoring bias persists even when the guinea pigs know that the starting datum is chosen completely at random.
“Building a world where anchoring is the right number”
To simplify, the brain works in two ways: quickly and intuitively or in another mode, slower and more reflexive. The fast mode seeks, by association of ideas, elements allowing us to get closer to the data that has been “anchored” in our brain. It is only later that the more reflective information processing system tries, through an adjustment, to find reasons to move away from the anchor, most often without much success.
Our brain must fight against its primary, intuitive functioning, which “understands sentences by trying to make them true” et “does its best to build a world where the anchor is the right number”, says Nobel Prize-winning Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman of Economics in 2002, who described this bias in the 1970s. “People adjust less [restent plus près de l’ancre] when their mental resources are exhausted”, especially when their minds are saturated with numbers, adds the author of System 1, system 2. The two speeds of thought (Flammarion, 2012).
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