You will be able to spot anchoring and confirmation bias in negotiations, estimates and reviews.
Mei's team is estimating how long it will take to migrate a client's records to a new system. Before anyone else speaks, the account director says, "The client's hoping for six weeks. What do we think?" One by one, the engineers give estimates: seven weeks, eight, maybe seven if the data is clean. The final plan says eight weeks. Three months later, the project is still running.
Nobody in the room thought they were influenced by the six weeks. Each engineer would say they estimated from their own experience. But the number spoken first set the range everyone else worked within. This lesson covers two biases that shape estimates, negotiations and reviews, and the simple habits that weaken them.
Anchoring is the tendency for a number you hear early to pull later estimates towards it, even when it has nothing to do with the question. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed this in an experiment Kahneman describes in Thinking, Fast and Slow. People spun a wheel of fortune that was rigged to stop on either a low or a high number, then estimated an unrelated quantity. Those who saw the high number gave clearly higher estimates than those who saw the low one. The number on the wheel was obviously meaningless, and it still moved their answers.
At work, anchors are rarely that random, but they are often just as unhelpful. The client's hoped-for six weeks says what the client wants, not how long the work takes. A previous vendor's price, a colleague's guess, last year's budget, the first salary figure mentioned in a negotiation: each can pull your judgement before you have started to think.
Anchors work even when you know about them. Being told "ignore that number" does not undo the pull, because it happens in the fast, automatic thinking from lesson 5.1, Fast and slow thinking. What helps is changing the order: form your own view before you see anyone else's.
The simplest defence is to write down your own number privately before any anchor reaches you. In a meeting, everyone writes their estimate on a piece of paper or in a private message, and the numbers are revealed together. Software teams do something similar with planning poker, where everyone shows a card at the same time so no one hears another estimate first.
Mei tries it at the next estimating session. She asks everyone to write a number before the director speaks. The estimates range from eight to fourteen weeks. That spread is useful information in itself. It shows the team is genuinely unsure, and the discussion turns to why the high estimates are high: one engineer has seen this client's data before and knows it is messy.
In negotiations, the same idea applies. Decide your own figure from your own research before you hear theirs, and write it down. If you are discussing pay, look up MOM's Occupational Wage Tables, MyCareersFuture listings and recruiter salary guides first, so the first number you hold in mind is one you chose. And remember that when you name a figure first, you set the anchor for the other side.
The second bias in this lesson is confirmation bias: looking for, noticing and remembering evidence that supports what you already believe, while overlooking evidence against it.
It rarely feels like bias from the inside. It feels like being right. Suppose Mei has already decided a new team member, Ravi, is a weak performer after a rocky first month. Over the next quarter she notices every missed deadline and every typo. His good work on a difficult client call barely registers, or gets put down to luck. By the time of his review, she has a full page of evidence, all of it real, all of it pointing one way. She never set out to be unfair. Her attention did the filtering for her.
Confirmation bias also shapes how people search for information. Someone who thinks a stock, a product or a policy is good will search for its strengths and click on the articles that agree. People tend to ask questions whose answers can only confirm what they think: "Did the new process help?" rather than "What would we see if it had not helped?"
The defence is to make the opposite case your job. Before a decision or a review, ask yourself: what evidence would change my mind? Write it down. Then go looking for it, as seriously as you looked for evidence that agreed with you.
For Mei, that means asking what she would expect to see if Ravi were actually a solid performer having a hard start. Good feedback from clients? Improving turnaround over the quarter? Strong work on tasks that suited his experience? She checks, and finds two of the three. Her review changes from "not meeting expectations" to a more specific conversation about the tasks where he struggles and why.
At team level, give someone the job of making the case against the leading option, and rotate it so it is not always the same person. Ask for evidence that the plan will not work, not only that it will. When a report supports what everyone hoped, apply the checks from Module 3 with extra care, because that is exactly when nobody wants to look hard.
None of this means abandoning your view. It means holding it in a way that new evidence can reach. Your next estimate at work is the easiest place to start, and the activity below shows you how to use it.
Before your next estimate at work, write your number privately first, then compare it with the group's and note any shift.
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