One cognitive bias, known as anchoring bias, is the tendency to rely heavily on the first piece of information

supplied when faced with a decision. When making a decision, anchoring happens when we use the first piece of
information given to make the following judgments. For example, if you first see a T-shirt that costs $1,200 and then
see a second t-shirt that costs $100 you're sure to see the second shirt as cheap. One study that supports the
anchoring bias is the English and Mussweiler (2001) study.

B.Englich and T. Mussweiler wanted to examine whether judges’ sentencing decisions are influenced by a
demanded sentence when other potential influences (e.g., severity of the crime or the defendant’s criminal record)
They used an independent sample design, which is where different participants are used in each condition of the
independent variable. This allowed the researchers to use the same case studies for the conditions of high and low
anchoring The sample was made out of I9 young trial judges (15 male, 4 female) with an average age of 29.37 and
9.34 months months of experience. They were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions and men
and women were equally distributed across them. The participants were given a case of alleged rape where the
prosecuter called for half the group 2 months and the other half a 34 month sentence time.Participants were handed
the case material, along with copies of the relevant passages from the penal code. They were instructed to
thoroughly work through this material and to form an opinion about the case.They took about 15 min to study these
materials which included all of the information (consequences for the victim, resistance of the victim) that has been
found to be important to allow for a sentence to be determined. Participants were then asked a series of questions,
one of which was to determine if the sentence was the correct amount of time.

The results showed that participants given prosecuting sentences of 34 months, the average sentence length was
28.70 months, while participants given a sentence of 2 months, had an average sentence length of 18.70 months.
This study shows the high impact of a first piece of information on our judgement and decision making. participants
given a higher sentence rate, aimed for a higher sentence, close to the original 34 month sentence given while on the
other hand, to a participant with a lower sentence demand, aimed much lower.