Anchoring Policy Summary

There are three biases that could affect the selection committee’s decision, which is anchoring bias, confirmation bias, and overconfidence bias.

The selection committee’s decision may be affected due to anchoring bias. This bias describes a person’s inclination to rely on the first piece of information while having difficulty in adjusting to new information (Robbins, Judge, Millet & Boyle, 2011). Already prone to the initial impression of their traits and personality, the selection committee could be swayed to choose either Malcolm or Tony based on the initial thoughts of their leadership style without knowing in detail about how they really lead and manage people. This anchoring bias can also be more prone in people who are experiencing sad or negative emotions (Bodenhausen, Gabriel & Lineberger, 2000). An experiment done on seventy undergraduate students tested the anchoring effect on neutral moods and sad moods. The results showed

Confirmation bias describes a tendency to specifically choose new information to reassert the beliefs of the current information (Robbins, Judge, Millet & Boyle, 2011). Again, since the selection committee has had an initial impression of the two candidates, there may be a tendency to quickly come to a conclusion and disregard new information that could actually be relevant. Soll, Milkman and Payne (2015) explains that people easily rely on System 1 and System 2 thinking when making decisions, which come from “automatic judgements” from past memory and deviating from the actual objective from laziness, respectively. This type of thinking limits the ability to think logically, called “cognitive rigidity”, which can stem from “time pressure, negative emotions, exhaustions, and other stressors” (Soll, Milkman & Payne 2015, p.7). The selection committee’s important decision can intensify these stressors, and must recognise this bias in order to make a logical