Anchoring

Anchoring or focalism is a term used in psychology to describe the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.

During normal decision making, individuals anchor, or overly rely, on specific information or a specific value and then adjust to that value to account for other elements of the circumstance. Usually once the anchor is set, there is a bias toward that value.

Take, for example, a man looking to buy a used car. He overly relies (anchors) on the odometer reading and the year of the car and mentally evaluates the value of that car. He does not consider how well the engine or the transmission is maintained.

As a second example, according to Daniel Kahneman if an audience is asked firstly to memorise the last 4 digits of their social security number and then to estimate the number of physicians in New York the correlation between the two numbers is around 0.4&mdash;far beyond what would be expected by chance. The simple act of thinking of the first number strongly influences the second, even though there is no logical connection between them.

NLP usage of the term
When the term Anchoring is used in reference to neuro-linguistic programming, the term is describing a trigger (whether internal or external) that reflexively alters the state of mind. For example, a voice tonality that resembles the characteristics of one's perception of an "angry voice" may not actually be as a result of anger, but will usually trigger an emotional response in the person perceiving the tonality to have the traits of anger.

Anchors (used in this sense of the word, can come in several different forms: verbal phrases, physical touches or sensations, certain sights and sounds, and internal dialogue, just to name a few.

Main article: Anchor (NLP)

See also: anchoring and adjustment, Framing (psychology), and Framing (economics).