Have you ever found yourself giving an answer or making a choice and wondering later if your decision was really your own? Chances are, you’ve been nudged in a certain direction without even knowing it. This silent influence often comes from something called the anchoring bias. From car prices to medical decisions and even tiny everyday choices, this bias can shape what we think is reasonable—or even true.
Let’s look into how the anchoring bias works, why it grabs us so easily, and how one professor’s clever question stumped some of the brightest students in the room. Video summary generated with artificial intelligence.
Understanding Anchoring: The Car Price Question
Imagine you’re in an MBA classroom at Columbia University with Professor Michael Morris. He starts with a simple question: “Do you think the average German car costs more than $90,000?” At first glance, this seems like a straightforward ask. But there’s more going on.
This question is a setup to introduce anchoring—a mental shortcut where your brain grabs onto the first piece of information it gets, the “anchor,” and lets that number pull all your later thinking toward it. The anchor could be a price, a number, or even a random fact. Even if you know the anchor might make no sense, your mind gravitates to it just the same.
Anchoring isn’t just a neat party trick—it shapes big decisions:
- Negotiations: The first offer sets the bar, often pulling everyone toward it, even if it’s way off.
- Medicine: Doctors can be swayed by the first piece of information about a patient, which can cloud their judgment and lead to mistakes.
- Everyday life: Whether you’re guessing the time, picking a price, or estimating how many candies are in a jar, you’re more likely to land closer to whatever anchor was set.
This bias shows up everywhere:
- Buying or selling anything
- Job interviews and salary talks
- Diagnoses and treatment options
- Guessing, estimating, and making snap calls
It’s almost automatic. Whether you want to or not, your thoughts drift near the anchor.
Tversky and Kahneman’s Foundational Anchoring Experiment
The story of anchoring begins with psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. In 1971, they set up a clever experiment to see whether a random number could change what people thought.
Participants first spun a rigged wheel with numbers from 1 to 100. The wheel always landed either on a high or low number, depending on the setup. Right after the spin, the researchers asked a very different question: How many African countries are members of the United Nations?
Participants who spun a high number thought the answer was much higher than those who spun a low number. Their guesses weren’t rooted in facts—they were tugged towards the wheel’s number, the anchor.
This was a big deal. It was the first hard proof that anchoring can steer even the smartest minds without them noticing. No matter how random the anchor was, people’s estimates clung to it.
Imagine a simple chart: The higher the anchor, the higher the estimate. The lower the anchor, the lower the estimate. This visual makes the invisible influence of anchors easy to spot.
Professor Morris’ MBA Student Experiment: High Achievers, Same Trap
Think that only the average person falls into this trap? Professor Michael Morris proved otherwise by turning the anchoring test toward his own MBA students.
He split his classroom in half. Group one heard: “Do you think the average German car from last year costs more than $90,000?” Group two got: “Do you think it costs more than $30,000?”
Right after, both groups had to estimate the average price themselves.
- $90,000 anchor: Students guessed the average price was between $45,000 and $50,000.
- $30,000 anchor: Students said $35,000 to $40,000.
That’s a huge difference, all created by the anchor. These weren’t rookie students—they were some of the brightest future business leaders. Yet no matter how much they relied on logic or reason, their answers gravitated toward the anchor they’d heard first.
There’s another twist. When asked how they reached their number, each group insisted they used “rational” thinking. Only when Professor Morris dug deeper did students from the high-anchor group mention luxury brands, like Mercedes, while those from the low-anchor group pictured more budget-friendly cars, like Volkswagen. The anchor had reached straight into their mental images.
Professor Morris summed it up:
“Intuition drives more than 90% of our thinking and behavior.”
The experiment revealed more than just a number trick. It exposed how mental images, nudged by the anchor, can shape reasoning—even when we’re sure we’re thinking for ourselves.
Comparing Group Thinking
- $90,000 Anchor Group
- Thought of luxury cars and brands
- Anchored higher in their guesses
- $30,000 Anchor Group
- Focused on affordable brands
- Anchored lower
No matter how much knowledge or logic people use, anchors have a hidden grip. Our minds fill the gaps with images, prices, or ideas that fit the first information we got—even if we know it’s not a fair start.
Why Anchoring Captures Even Experts
Anchoring bias doesn’t care about experience or education. It can influence everyone, from top students to seasoned pros.
Negotiators see the effect all the time. The first number on the table, even if outrageous, can shape where discussions end. A seller who starts high can pull in higher bids, while a buyer who opens low may push the outcome downward.
Doctors and medical staff are at risk, too. The first symptom or early clue can set off a chain of thinking that’s hard to break, leading to screening errors or wrong diagnoses.
So why is it so tough to dodge the anchor? It comes down to intuition. Our snap judgments, the gut feelings we rely on every day, follow the first information they grab onto.
First impressions stick. Whether it’s a number, idea, or a person’s introduction, what comes first lingers in the back of our minds and shapes what comes next.
Here’s how anchoring shapes thinking in three steps:
- You see or hear the anchor (number, fact, or idea).
- Your intuition drifts toward it, building a mental picture around it.
- Your final answer, guess, or decision sits near the anchor—even if you try to adjust away.
Anchoring bias is everywhere: at the car dealership, in business talks, and during quick-fire decisions in daily life. The first thing you see or hear can stick with you, whether you want it to or not. It’s part of how we’re wired.
But knowing anchoring exists makes a big difference. By spotting the anchors around you—and inside you—you can make choices that actually reflect what you want or believe, not just what you heard first.
Stay curious about the patterns in your own thinking. Keep questioning, keep learning, and don’t let the anchor do all the steering.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.