What It Is: The tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information received.
Example: In a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, two groups of people were given obviously incorrect anchors: one group was asked whether Mahatma Gandhi died before age 9, and the other group was asked whether he died after the age of 140. They were then asked to guess the correct age at death. The group given the lower number guessed an age significantly younger than the group given the higher number.