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. Psychology (ancient Greek: psyche = soul or mind, logos/-ology = study of) is an academic and applied field involving the study of the mind and behavior, both human and (less frequently) nonhuman. ...

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 person looking to buy a used car - they may focus excessively on the odometer reading and the year of the car, and use those criteria as a basis for evaluating the value of the car, rather than considering 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—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. Daniel Kahneman Daniel Kahneman (born March 5, 1934 in Tel Aviv, in the then British Mandate of Palestine, now in Israel), is a key pioneer and theorist of behavioral finance, which integrates economics and cognitive science to explain seemingly irrational risk management behavior in human beings. ... This article needs cleanup. ...

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. Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a collection of pseudoscientific self-help rituals proposed for programming the mind (Lilienfeld et al 2003;Raso 1994). ...

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) Anchoring is a neuro-linguistic programming term for the process by which memory recall, state change or other responses become associated with (anchored to) some stimulus, in such a way that perception of the stimulus (the anchor) leads by reflex to the anchored response occurring. ...

See also: anchoring and adjustment, Framing (psychology), and Framing (economics). Anchoring and adjustment is a psychological heuristic said to influence the way people estimate probabilities intuitively. ... Frames, according to many psychologists, linguists and cognitive scientists, are mental structures that are used to facilitate the thinking process. ... In economics, framing means the manner in which a rational choice problem has been presented. ...