The Cognitive Approach
Cognitive psychology is built on the idea that mental processes (perception, attention, memory, reasoning) shape behaviour in ways that can be studied scientifically. Rather than treating the mind as a black box, the cognitive approach tries to model what happens between a stimulus and a response. The subtopics here cover the major frameworks: how memory is structured, how learning occurs, how decisions get made, and how mental shortcuts can lead us astray.
A recurring concept across all of these is bias: the ways systematic errors in thinking produce predictable patterns of behaviour. Another is change, particularly how learning (classical and operant conditioning) changes what we do. Keep these concepts in view as you move through the material.
Anchoring Bias
The tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information encountered when making a judgement or decision. That initial value, the anchor, skews all subsequent estimates, even when it is arbitrary or irrelevant.
Two mechanisms explain why anchoring persists. First, the anchor offers cognitive ease: it gives the mind a starting point and reduces the effort required to generate a fresh estimate. Second, people engage in insufficient adjustment. They move away from the anchor, but not far enough, even when they recognise that the anchor has no logical bearing on the answer.
The foundational evidence comes from Tversky and Kahneman (1974). Participants watched a wheel spin to either 10 or 65 (the outcomes were rigged), then estimated the percentage of African nations in the United Nations. Those who saw 10 gave an average estimate of 25%; those who saw 65 averaged 45%. The wheel number was obviously unrelated to the question, yet it shifted responses by 20 percentage points. This demonstrates the concept of bias clearly: a systematic, predictable error driven not by the evidence but by an irrelevant prior value.
Anchoring appears in applied settings too. In retail pricing, a prominently displayed "original" price acts as the anchor, making the sale price feel like a bargain regardless of the item's actual value. In legal contexts, initial sentencing recommendations can anchor a judge's eventual decision, and a jury's first round of deliberations often anchors the final verdict.
A common exam mistake is to describe anchoring as simply "being influenced by numbers". The key point is that the anchor is often irrelevant to the judgement. Its influence is the bias, not rational updating from relevant information.
Individual differences matter here. People with relevant expertise or explicit awareness of the bias show smaller anchoring effects, which limits how far findings from laboratory tasks generalise to experienced professionals.
The ecological validity of spinning-wheel paradigms is also limited. Real decisions involve motivation, domain knowledge, and social context that the lab strips away.