Think Before You Like: Social Media's Effect on the Brain and the Tools You Need to Navigate Your Newsfeed by Guy P. Harrison

Author:Guy P. Harrison [Harrison, Guy P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Media Studies, Non-Fiction, Psychology, Self-Help, Social Media, Skepticism, Critical Thinking
ISBN: 9781633883512
Google: vSEcDgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1633883515
Goodreads: 34943995
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2017-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

WATCH WHERE YOUR ANCHOR DROPS

The anchoring effect can cause our thinking to set sail for the wrong harbor. The human brain is demanding, one could say greedy, in its constant need for blood and oxygen. No other organ comes close to its requirements. The three-pound brain of a 150-pound adult accounts for just 2 percent of bodyweight but demands as much as 25 percent of the body's blood supply. The brain hungers for information in much the same way. The brain's mantra could be “keep it coming”; something is always preferable to nothing. Your shadow brain wants, craves, and covets input of any kind to serve you. Working behind the scenes, it is relentless in trying to help you stay alive and succeed. Most of the time it works out well. Sometimes, however, no good, accurate, or useful information is available. But the subconscious mind doesn't give up on its mission to serve you. So, for better or worse, it will seize the first thing available to work with. The absence of accurate, relevant, or timely information prior to decision making seems to be an uncomfortable or intolerable state for the subconscious mind; so, in a pinch, your shadow brain will make do with almost any extraneous input. The early information that hits a knowledge vacuum matters. It becomes the anchor around which later thinking and decision making grows.

A simple example of the anchoring bias can be found at car dealerships. A dealer puts a price on the car's window. That price is high, too high, but a typical potential buyer doesn't know how much the dealer actually paid for the vehicle wholesale, so a fair price is unknown. However, with that sticker price offered up as an anchor, the first bit of information, the buyer's subconscious has a starting point from which to work and, the dealer hopes, it will sway the buyer to estimate higher on what a fair price is.

It is remarkable, even scary, how anchoring bias can steer us toward answers and opinions with frivolous information. For example, if I were to mention or show you a large number, say 100,000, and later ask you to guess how many spoons or forks you have in your home, you likely would guess a higher number than if I had earlier exposed you to the number 10, 20, or some other lesser number. Because you didn't know how many silverware items you have, your subconscious mind would instantly scramble for input of any kind that might help you come up with a good answer. Having recently been exposed to a number, any number, could be enough to set your mind off in one direction over another—even though that first number had nothing to do with the silverware count.

To be clear, the anchoring effect is different from the mere exposure effect because it is based on our mind's willingness to rely on an anchor, a specific bit or bits of information, even though it is unrelated to the decision or task at hand.

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