Abstract
The ability to make good decisions is key to personal and professional success for students. In this case study, we outline a set of in-class exercises that we have used for students in business, law, human resources and public policy to help them understand and internalize their own susceptibility to cognitive errors. Specifically, we illustrate an experiential way to teach and learn the anchoring effect: a cognitive bias that causes decision-makers to rely too heavily on initial information when making subsequent judgments. We describe an anchoring exercise that can be easily adapted across various settings, and show the effectiveness of the exercise in achieving the learning outcomes based on aggregated classroom data and our own experiences of student reactions. We show the robustness of the exercise to adaptation and highlight challenges we encountered. We also discuss how the exercise can be used to encourage students to consider anchoring’s ethical implications, as well as strategies to safeguard against being anchored.
Highlights
The ability to make good decisions is key to personal and professional success for students
The anchoring effect is a cognitive bias in which information first learned about a subject affects future decision-making (Furnham & Boo, 2011)
Do we start with the anchor and adjust the boundary of the range of plausible values (“anchor and adjustment”) or do we activate latent information that is consistent with the anchor presented (“confirmatory search” or “selective accessibility”)? Numerous empirical studies examine these and other mechanisms associated with the anchoring effect (Furnham & Boo, 2011)
Summary
The ability to make good decisions is key to personal and professional success for students. In the courses we have taught in law, business, industrial relations, public policy, public health, and human resources, it is common to include material about heuristics and cognitive biases—those traits that can enable quick decisions and lead to perceptual distortions, inaccurate judgments, and illogical interpretations. Helping students recognize their cognitive biases is important because these predispositions are notoriously difficult to overcome, yet can have serious consequences (Cirka & Corrigall, 2010). In a well-known study conducted by Northcraft and Neal (1987), two
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