3 examples of anchoring

[Flopfoot]

Anchoring is a psychological concept where a person’s idea about something depends a lot on their initial impression or approach to it. For e.g. you might see a pen that was $10 but has been discounted to $2. Even though you think $2 is too much for a pen, you might be impressed that a pen that is “worth 10” can be gotten so cheaply. On the other hand, you might see a pen that used to be $1 and there is a sign saying “due to increase in production prices this pen now costs $2” and you would think that it is a rip off and you don’t want to buy it.

We would like to avoid anchoring and just see things as they are, but it is difficult, especially things which are a balance of two priorities. If you’re teaching a child to play basketball you can’t just say “dribble when appropriate, pass when appropriate” because the child has no experience and doesn’t know what’s appropriate. You have to anchor him to one end or the other.

The bad approach would be to say “always dribble”, and then gradually introduce the situations where he should pass (and children are most likely to think this way themselves anyway). The good approach is to say “always pass”, then when he gets the hang out that, you can help him figure out when it’s better to dribble.

So now for my examples in Christianity. The first is about sex, you can either tell children “sex is good” or “sex is bad”. Now considering that the secular culture is crazy about sex and glorifies sexual sins, it’s not surprising that we usually choose to anchor people the other way by saying “Never have sex, don’t even look at women” and then introducing the exception “unless you are married” (and sometimes, people are left on their own to figure out what to do now that they are married).

But an alternative approach could be to tell people “your aim in life is to have children, to do that you have to have sex, to do that you have to get married”. The upside of this positive approach is that sex is not the goal, it’s just a step along the way - whereas the negative approach seems to echo the secular culture’s idea that the goal of sex is to do it with no consequences, and the only difference for the Christian is that they have to consider eternal consequences as well as pregnancy and STIs. With this approach we may take a slight hit to vocations since we are emphasizing married life as the default vocation, but at least we are passing on God’s commandment to be fruitful and multiply!

Second example is about the immanence and transcendence of God - in other words, a God that is “here beside us” but that is also “way above us” respectively. We mostly anchor people in transcendence. For Christians, this is again a response to the non-Christian world going off the rails - in this case, because of the new age movement saying silly things like “we are all gods”. But the world in general can also emphasize His transcendence because it keeps him “in a box” away from the rational, scientific reality that we live in, whereas immanence sounds too much like pseudoscience.

continued in first comment

 

[Flopfoot]

It’s not a bad way to be anchored, since we don’t want people to get too comfortable with God - fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. But when you only think about “God is up in heaven watching me sin”, the rules He hands down can feel arbitrary and make you want to rebel against them (see Dostoyevsky). It’s helpful to balance this out with “God is the source of my being and is more intimate to me than I am to myself”, because that gives you the perspective that you need to live in harmony with God’s rules, that following them is the only way to achieve your own goodness and happiness.

Third example is how important knowledge is to being a good Christian. Religion is not only about knowing what’s good, but also about doing what’s good. But can you do what you don’t know? I like this quote by Thomas Aquinas: “Three things are necessary for the salvation of man. To know what he ought to believe, to know what he ought to desire, and to know what he ought to do.”

But I’ve been reading a book called The Imitation of Christ by the monk Thomas a Kempis and it annoyed me because he starts off his book by dissing those who care too much about knowledge, particularly what he thinks of as “useless knowledge”. He tries to put in a disclaimer at one point to admit that some knowledge is useful, but he’s clearly chosen a side. He wants to emphasize the importance of good living, self mastery, and having a relationship with God. I guess I can cut him some slack because he’s from the 1400s and had no idea how big a problem anti-intellectualism would be in the 2000s, and I’m going to keep reading through his book, but I’m just pointing out that we have anchored ourselves on opposite ends of this question.

 

[meltzerboy2]

I like your examples of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic. I would only point out that like all the heuristics (shortcut rules of thumb), although we are all susceptible to this way of thinking, it is not always beneficial for us to process information using this approach. In other words, if we can become aware that we are using the anchoring and adjustment heuristic, sometimes we might take that into consideration and try not to think this way.