This is the final exam for Anchoring & Adjustment. It pulls the whole course together: how a starting number quietly drags your estimate toward it and how you stop adjusting too soon, marooned at the near edge of the plausible range; the wheel-of-fortune study where a rigged spin of 10 or 65 moved guesses about African nations in the UN; the multiplication trick where 8×7×…×1 beats 1×2×…×8 even though both are the same product and both fall far below the true 40,320; Ariely’s coherent arbitrariness, where the last two digits of a Social Security number nudge willingness-to-pay threefold yet preferences stay internally tidy; the two engines under the hood — anchor-and-adjust for self-generated anchors versus selective accessibility for planted ones; anchors loose in the wild in negotiation first offers, precise price tags, MSRP and “was-now” decoys, quantity limits, real-estate appraisals and dice-roll sentencing; and the debiasing kit, along with the caveat that a relevant anchor is just a sensible prior. Several questions look easy until you notice which mechanism is really at work, so reason each one through before you commit.
How this exam works
Read carefully — this exam is final. Each question appears one at a time. Once you submit an answer it is locked for good: there’s no going back, no retry, and no restart. Your score is hidden until the end, where you’ll see a pass/fail verdict. The pass mark is 70%. A few questions ask you to select all correct answers.
What is the cleanest one-sentence definition of the anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic?
Select an answer to continue.
Course Recap
Big picture
Anchoring & Adjustment, in one picture
- Anchoring & Adjustment
- The mechanism
- An anchor sets the starting point, you adjust away from it, but you stop at the near edge of the plausible range — so the estimate assimilates toward the anchor
- The classic experiments
- The rigged wheel (10 vs 65 → ~25% vs ~45%), the 8×7×…×1 vs 1×2×…×8 multiplication (both far below 40,320), and the SSN-digit bids that varied ~3x yet stayed coherent
- The two engines
- Anchor-and-adjust for self-generated anchors (effortful, somewhat reducible) versus selective accessibility for provided anchors (anchor-consistent info becomes accessible, robust)
- Anchors in the wild
- Negotiation first offers and precise numbers, MSRP and was-now reference prices, quantity limits like Limit 12, real-estate listing prices swaying appraisers, and dice-roll sentencing
- Defusing the anchor
- Consider the opposite, estimate first, question the anchor’s provenance, think in ranges, aggregate independent opinions — and remember a relevant anchor is just a sensible prior
- The mechanism
Key takeaways
Anchoring is not gullibility — it is the sensible move of starting from an available number, sabotaged by stopping the adjustment too soon. That single flaw shows up everywhere: rigged wheels, quick multiplications, Social Security digits, first offers, price tags, purchase limits, home appraisals, and even courtroom sentences, and it survives warnings, incentives, and expertise. The defense is not willpower but structure — generate your own number first, consider the opposite, interrogate where the anchor came from, and reason in ranges. Do that, and you keep the one honest use of an anchor (a relevant number is a good prior) while disarming the arbitrary ones.