I’d prefer doing it with a random sample of people who haven’t been told about anchoring before. LW is in general hopelessly tainted by people aware of their cognitive biases to do any useful tests about what the standard biases are. And who happens to reply to a comments thread is a terrible randomization procedure.
Hey, maybe at some point it actually would be useful to study the effects of biases on people who already know about biases, compared to the general population.
(Maybe psychologists do this already, i wouldn’t know.)
Agree—interesting to see such a strong effect on people who should have been trying their hardest to ignore the anchor. (assuming some unrelated aspect of experimental design isn’t skewing the results)
Would also be interesting to have a personal quiz with many questions so that you could test your own anchoring bias. (And see if you could train yourself out of it… at least in circumstances where you know it’s an issue)
Disclaimer: didn’t take part in the experiment myself (ugh factor/fear of failing on general knowloedge quizzes)
I think people haven’t been trying their hardest (nor they were instructed to). To try hardest in such a case means to use reasoning similar to this comment, which probably only minority did.
Definitely. I support doing this again.
I’d prefer doing it with a random sample of people who haven’t been told about anchoring before. LW is in general hopelessly tainted by people aware of their cognitive biases to do any useful tests about what the standard biases are. And who happens to reply to a comments thread is a terrible randomization procedure.
Hey, maybe at some point it actually would be useful to study the effects of biases on people who already know about biases, compared to the general population.
(Maybe psychologists do this already, i wouldn’t know.)
I think the point was to see if LW readers could avoid a bias they knew they were being tested on.
Agree—interesting to see such a strong effect on people who should have been trying their hardest to ignore the anchor. (assuming some unrelated aspect of experimental design isn’t skewing the results)
Would also be interesting to have a personal quiz with many questions so that you could test your own anchoring bias. (And see if you could train yourself out of it… at least in circumstances where you know it’s an issue)
Disclaimer: didn’t take part in the experiment myself (ugh factor/fear of failing on general knowloedge quizzes)
I think people haven’t been trying their hardest (nor they were instructed to). To try hardest in such a case means to use reasoning similar to this comment, which probably only minority did.