Jānis Ķesa

Anchoring sounds like a good idea when you intend to stay at the same spot and the sea is relatively calm but it might as well be a limiting decision if we are on the expedition to discover something novel. When it comes to human behaviour and cognitive biases, anchoring is exactly an answer to a quest for safe haven. Well.. at least that is how our brain “sees” this cognitive shortcut.

If it is about safety, why should we worry about it? The safety in this case is built around the first bits of information that a person receives in context of new set of variables characterising a situation, (the touchpoint of anchor if we want to keep the analogy) that are quickly adopted by our brains as the most trustworthy and reliable information, making all other options just unsafe or even dangerous alternatives. We all tend to heavily rely on this first piece of information (anchor) when making decisions. We often undervalue most of the following information or even neglect it.

This bias is commonly explained by an example of negotiating a price or bargaining. As soon as you hear the first price, it is very hard to go below or above that point (depending if you are seller or buyer), the anchor has been set and all the dialogue is going to evolve around that set value.

While the set price is a very straightforward example and you probably recollect a memory of yourself setting a starting price too low or buying something too expensive when the seller set the starting price too high this bias works with almost every type of information that we process. Have you heard of the “first impression” as being the most lasting one? Or more abstractly and closer to service design – if you hear from your first source of information that for example the public transport system is totally not working because its time tables are unreliable, you will be looking for this same insight with every source you come across. And even if you don’t find other evidence it is not unlikely that you will present this “first problem” as one of the core problems, just because “the anchor” is there.

In service design, anchoring bias might result in giving disproportionate weight to initial data or first impressions therefore sabotaging further findings and fair evaluation of problems. 

How do we avoid anchoring bias in service design? As always it is a good idea to set up a diverse team. Individual tasks may help too. The above suggestions led to an evaluation by peers who did not get “anchored” by this same information. Triangulation of research methods is another way to avoid relying too heavily on one piece of information. Inviting external experts to evaluate the findings might also be helpful. But most of all it helps to be aware that “anchoring” is a real thing, it is a cognitive bias that we all face and we can all avoid it to an extent by acknowledging our tendency to assign more weight to “first impressions”.