The Anchoring Effect

Anchoring is the cognitive operation by which an initial value — sometimes wholly arbitrary, sometimes deeply experiential — becomes the starting point from which subsequent estimates are generated by insufficient adjustment. Tversky and Kahneman demonstrated the effect with roulette wheels, calculator displays, and expert appraisals, showing that even manifestly irrelevant anchors move subsequent estimates in predictable directions. In the AI transition, the anchors are not arbitrary numbers but decades of professional experience, institutional memory, and accumulated expertise. The senior engineer's estimate of how long a project should take is anchored on hundreds of similar projects completed without AI assistance; the anchor is genuinely experiential, but it was set in a different world, and the adjustment from it is insufficient by orders of magnitude. The Trivandrum six-week estimate that collapsed to three days is the canonical illustration.