It's well established that humans have a strong anchoring bias.

It's well established that humans have a strong anchoring bias. Why?

In a vast sea of possibilities, many of which are non-viable, we prefer ones that are more likely to be viable.

If an option is pre-existing then all else equal, it's more likely to be viable.

Ideas that aren't useful tend to erode over time when they aren't used.

Entropy erodes things.

So if an idea is pre-existing, it either popped onto the scene recently, or someone found it useful enough to keep around.

The more times it's worked in the past, in the more varied the conditions, the more likely it is to work in this condition, too. It's Lindy.

Streaks and precedents are repeated anchors over time, which become more and more of a rut.

When in doubt, start out where you were last time that worked (or didn't not work) and then consider if any adjacent moves feel better. If not, stay where you are.

The anchoring bias exists because as a general purpose decision making tool it's pretty good in most circumstances, actually!

We just tend to focus on the edge cases where it doesn't work very well, like adversarial negotiations.