The invisible nudge reducing your productivity – anchoring (and how to defeat it with adjustment)

Making decisions with imperfect information

You’ve been in this situation before. You need to make a business (or personal decision) in order for your team to move forward. You don’t have the time or expertise (well okay maybe with the deep thinking modes of GenAI chatbots, you do have that expertise, but then there’s the issue of reliability) to conduct research on it. So you mentally run through what you know, adjust based on the information and factors, and then go ahead with that decision. This is known as the anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic, and it makes sense. What else are you going to do, right?

After all, we all have make decisions without complete information, sometimes under time pressure. The rational thing to do is to collect the information that comes to mind (which forms an anchor) and then adjust our expectations until we come to an estimate (Epley & Gilovich, 2006).

But there’s a dark side to this. We have biases when we create anchors, and we often fail to make enough adjustments to account for that bias.

In other words, our decision-making isn’t as stellar as it may seem.

Anchoring – the sales tactic we’ve all seen before

If you’re a marketing student, you’ve probably seen this idea before. Let’s say you want to sell a $50 item or service. You start by presenting a $500 option first. That $500 option becomes the anchor against which future options are presented (Schwartz, 2016) – and hence, the $50 option now looks like a fantastic deal. You buy the $50 option, without actually considering how other options in the market actually cost.

This is how our judgement is influenced by raising the accessibility of the target attribute (the item we want the person to buy) relative to other values of the same attribute (Kahneman, 2003).

But the thing is – this relates to other things in life too.

It relates to time estimates (okay I can finish this in 90 minutes) (oh shit I took 3 hours to finish this essay).

It relates to budgets (this writing project will cost $500,000) (hm $100,000 for this article sounds like a good deal) (please hire me for $100,000 articles by the way).

It relates to performance goals (let’s set 50,000 views as the target) (oh it’s going viral, let’s go for 50,500 views instead).

It’s related to planning fallacy – our chronic underestimation of task duration (Buehler et al., 1994).

We don’t adjust enough

People don’t adjust enough from the original anchor value. The thought process goes like this. You create an anchor which comes with an implicit range of plausible values. When you adjust, your estimate eventually lies on the anchor side of the range (because that’s what you first thought of) – but the better judgement is actually the middle of the range. (Epley & Gilovich, 2006).

Basically, we make adjustments that are too small.

And that’s because adjusting is hard. Adjusting is a conscious and deliberate process (Epley & Gilovich, 2006). It takes energy, it takes effort, so as energy-conserving mammals we don’t necessarily do it all the time unless it’s important to us.

Thinking fast and slow

To understand this, we need to look at the systems of thinking we have. Daniel Kahneman (2011) explained this as System 1 (intuitive) and System 2 (deliberate) thinking.

System 1 is fast, intuitive, and and automatic thinking. It’s how we process things by default. It takes less energy. It’s instinctual, and without it we wouldn’t be able to operate because it means we have to consciously think about each tooth we brush.

System 2 is slow, deliberate, and effortful thinking. It’s what we do when we solve Mathematics problem sums. It takes up more energy, it requires rationality and consideration, and it is basically how we got to human civilisation today. Without System 2 thinking, we wouldn’t have been able to create the systems and institutions that we have today.

Anchoring is rooted in System 1 thinking – an automatic process – while System 2 thinking – a deliberative process – functions as the adjuster (B. Schwartz, personal communication, September 6, 2025).

Positive productivity playbook

It’s clear that we need to be deliberative to make better choices and be more productive – but you can’t be deliberative about every decision that uses the anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic. That would be unrealistic.

Instead, we take small steps from positive psychology to increase our adjustment and reduce anchoring.

1. Mindfulness

Being more present in the moment places that valuable pause between stimulus and response, allowing us to trade System 1 thinking for System 2 adjustments. Setting the intention before and during a task helps us to think more clearly in the short term, while meditation helps to increase our mindfulness over the long term.

2. Implementation intentions

If you’re a programmer then you probably love implementation intentions, which is “if-this-then-that” thinking. You consider a trigger or obstacle (“if I overrun this interview”) and then develop a solution for it (“I will shift the next meeting to tomorrow”).

This makes you adjust better, because you now consider the reality of the situation and then you think about what to do next.

3. Create two anchors

It’s likely that your anchor is either optimistic or pessimistic (depending on your explanatory styles). After you generate your anchor, take time to create a second anchor that is the opposite (pessimistic or optimistic).

This way, you have two anchors – each on the different side of the range of plausible values. Then take the mid point of both anchors, which will generate better adjustment.

4. Time-box

Time-boxing is assigning a fixed amount of time to the task duration. Yes it may be difficult, and yes you are being specific. But you know what? Specific and difficult goals elevate your performance, although you need to have self-efficacy and motivation (Locke, 1996) for that.

So a specific and challenging time duration may very well increase your performance, as well as making you spend more time to adjust.

Adjusting elevates productivity

Anchoring generally reduces buffers and creates stress, in addition to inflating promises. Increasing your adjustment through positive psychology helps you to create more realistic expectations and therefore align your effort and energy better – thus increasing your productivity.

What happens you increase productivity? Your self-efficacy increases, which increases your wellbeing. And when you have better wellbeing, you can do more, and you can do better. Oh and you increase your motivation, too.

So the next time you have to make a decision, pause a little and think about how your anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic is working – then shift it towards adjusting.

References

Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the “planning fallacy”: Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 366–381. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.3.366

Epley, N., & Gilovich, T. (2006). The Anchoring-and-Adjustment Heuristic: Why the Adjustments Are Insufficient: Why the Adjustments Are Insufficient. Psychological Science, 17(4), 311-318. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01704.x

Kahneman, D. (2003). A perspective on judgment and choice. American Psychologist, 58, 697-720. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066x.58.9.697

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Locke, E. A. (1996). Motivation through conscious goal setting. Applied and Preventive Psychology, 5, 117-124. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0962-1849(96)80005-9

Schwartz, B. (2016). The paradox of choice: Why more is less. HarperCollins.