Where does anchoring collide?

An initial value that biases a later numeric judgment: people asked for an estimate start from whatever number is in front of them and adjust away from it, but the adjustment falls short, so the final answer stays pulled toward the start. Tversky and Kahneman described the effect in 1974 in Science, where spinning a wheel of fortune before a factual estimate shifted the estimate toward the arbitrary result. Epley and Gilovich showed in 2006 that the adjustment is insufficient because people stop as soon as an answer seems plausible. The referent is a person's numeric estimate under uncertainty, the unit is the size of the bias in the units of the judgment, and nothing is physically fixed to anything; the anchor holds only the mind.[1][2]

Unit

A person's numeric estimate under uncertainty

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

The shift in estimates toward a presented anchor, in the units of the judged quantity

A lipid tail that ties a protein to the outer face of a cell membrane, so a molecule with no membrane-spanning segment still sits at the surface. Ferguson and Williams reviewed the glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI) anchor in 1988 in the Annual Review of Biochemistry: a glycan bridge links the protein's C-terminus to a phosphatidylinositol lipid, whose fatty chains insert into the bilayer. The referent is a single protein and the membrane it is tethered to, the unit is molecular, and the tether can be cut by a specific phospholipase to release the protein. The anchor is a covalent modification, not a load-bearing fixture and not a bias.[3]

Unit

A single protein tethered to a membrane

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Presence of a GPI anchor, shown by release on phospholipase treatment and by anchor structure

The tying of a tensed clause's reference time to a fixed point, usually the moment of speech, so that past, present, and future are read relative to that anchor. Enç argued in 1987 in Linguistic Inquiry that tenses are referential and must be anchored, either to the utterance or to a higher clause's time, by structural conditions rather than by free choice. The referent is the temporal interpretation of a sentence, there is no unit and nothing physical, and the anchor is a point in time that reference is computed against. It shares only the word with the initial estimate, the rock bolt, and the lipid tail.[4]

Unit

The temporal reference of a tensed clause

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Not measured; judged from whether a tense can be anchored to the speech time or a higher clause