Anchoring Critical Thinking

Chapters ten through twelve began to focus on why people think the way they do, as well as why one responds to questions in the manner that they do. There were two heuristics found inside of these three chapters that specifically interested me in their ties to our humanity; they were the bias of confidence over doubt and the anchoring principle. The bias of confidence over doubt is attributed to the fact that we all have a lazy System Two that prefers to accept certainty over doubt. Maintaining incredulity requires constant effort and thought, something that System Two is not always willing to put forth, which leads us to choose certainty and therefore belief in patterns and a coherent world, even when it is patterns that run our world. This belief in patterns causes us to be certain that a regularity, such as six girls being born in a row at a hospital, is caused by something and is not random at all. In all reality, though, it is a completely random occurrence; after all, it is impossible for anyone to control the gender of a child being born! Our humanity
While we are well aware of the anchoring number, we are unable to realize how it constrains our thinking, merely because we are unable to imagine how we would have chosen a different answer if the anchor had been absent. This inability to decipher how we would have chosen differently is directly related to our humanity; as a person raised in the Church, my mind has been “anchored” to respond to certain situations in certain ways. I have no clue how my response would differ if I lacked the anchor of the Church. While this does not contain the numerical values the book is talking about, I think that it is a valuable concept to examine, especially as we desire to understand people who have been raised in cultures that are drastically different from