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Overcoming the anchoring effect
How UX teams can use psychology to make better decisions.
Perhaps you’ve encountered a situation like the following: you’re working with key stakeholders on a new or redesigned product, and during an initial meeting, someone suggests a specific set of features that must be included in the first release. This idea, though not yet backed by user research, quickly gains traction and becomes the default assumption in every subsequent discussion. Despite later data suggesting that users have a different priority in terms of the features they need, the team continues to gravitate toward that original suggestion, as it has become the mental anchor for the design. This is an example of the anchoring effect, where initial information unduly influences decision-making, leading the team to potentially overlook better options that could enhance the user experience.
The anchoring effect is a well-documented cognitive bias where individuals rely too heavily on the first piece of information they encounter — the “anchor” — when making decisions. This initial piece of information sets a reference point, consciously or unconsciously influencing subsequent judgments, even if the anchor is irrelevant or misleading. In UX design, anchoring can lead to skewed decisions that don’t fully consider all aspects of a project, potentially resulting in suboptimal design choices and experiences that don’t align with user needs.
Background on the Anchoring Effect
The concept of the anchoring effect was first introduced by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in their seminal 1974 paper, “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” They demonstrated that people tend to rely heavily on an initial piece of information (the anchor) when making decisions under uncertainty. This bias persists even when the anchor is arbitrary or unrelated to the task at hand. The anchoring effect has since been widely studied in various contexts, including financial decision-making, negotiations, and consumer behavior, highlighting its pervasive influence on human cognition.
