Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

What's going on here? Why should a phone number or a spin on a wheel of fortune influence a belief about history or the composition of the UN? During the process of anchoring and adjustment, people begin at some arbitrary starting point and keep moving until they find an answer they like. If the number 10 pops up on the wheel, people start by asking themselves, perhaps unconsciously, "Is 10 a plausible answer to the UN question?" If not, they work their way up until they find a value (say, 25) that seems plausible. If 65 comes up, they may head in the opposite direction: "Is 65 a plausible answer? How about 55?" The trouble is, anchoring at a single arbitrarily chosen point can steer us toward answers that are just barely plausible: starting low leads people to the lowest plausible answer, but starting high leads them to the highest plausible answer. Neither strategy directs people to what might be the most sensible response — one in the middle of the range of plausible answers. If you think that the correct answer is somewhere between 25 and 45, why say 25 or 45? You're probably better off guessing 35, but the psychology of anchoring means that people rarely do.f

Anchoring has gotten a considerable amount of attention in psychological literature, but it's by no means the only illustration of how beliefs and judgments can be contaminated by peripheral or even irrelevant information. To take another example, people who are asked to hold a pen between their teeth gently, without letting it

*When did Attila actually get routed? A.D. 451.

tlf you're aware of the process of anchoring and adjustment, you can see that why it is

that during a financial negotation it's generally better to make the opening bid than to

respond to it. This phenomenon also explains why, as one recent study showed, su

permarkets can sell more cans of soup with signs that say LIMIT 12 PER CUS

TOMER rather than LIMIT 4 PER CUSTOMER.

touch their lips, rate cartoons as more enjoyable than do people who hold a pen with pursed lips. Why should that be? You can get a hint if you try following these instructions while looking in a mirror: Hold a pen between your teeth "gently, without letting it touch the lips." Now look at the shape of your lips. You'll see that the corners are upturned, in the position of a smile. And thus, through the force of context-dependent memory, upturned lips tend to automatically lead to happy thoughts.

A similar line of experiments asked people to use their non-dominant hand (the left, for right-handed people) to write down names of celebrities as fast as they could while classifying them into categories (like, dont like, neutral). They had to do this while either

(1) pressing their dominant hand, palm down, against the top of a table or (2) pushing their dominant hand, palm upward, against the bottom of a table. Palms-up people listed more positive than negative names, while palms-down people produced more negative names than positive. Why? Palms-up people were positioned in a positive "approach" posture while palms-down people were positioned in an "avoid" posture. The data show that such subtle differences routinely affect our memories and, ultimately, our beliefs.

Another source of contamination is a kind of mental shortcut, the human tendency to believe that what is familiar is good. Take, for example, an odd phenomenon known as the "mere familiarity" effect: if you ask people to rate things like the characters in Chinese writing, they tend to prefer those that they have seen before to those they haven't. Another study, replicated in at least 12 different languages, showed that people have a surprising attachment to the letters found in their own names, preferring words that contain those letters to words that don't. One colleague of mine has even suggested, somewhat scandalously, that people may love famous paintings as much for their familiarity as for their beauty.