Anchor the number before they can think.
Tversky and Kahneman's wheel of fortune, chapter 14, is the demonstration that will not go away. A rigged wheel stops on 10 or 65, in full view, and estimates of an unrelated quantity move by twenty percentage points. The subjects watched it spin. They knew it was random.
Northcraft and Neale's 1987 study is the operational proof. Real estate agents — professionals, valuing a real property, with the full listing package — produced appraisals that tracked an experimentally manipulated list price. Asked afterwards whether the list price had influenced them, they said it had not, and they were not lying: the effect is not available to introspection.
The mechanism is selective accessibility. The anchor does not merely provide a starting point; it makes anchor-consistent evidence easier to retrieve, so the adjustment is performed on a biased sample of considerations and terminates early.
The operational instruction follows directly and is the reason professional negotiators fight over it. Speak first. The received wisdom that one should never make the first offer is wrong in most conditions, and the negotiation literature has largely reversed on it: the first credible number sets the zone.
Four properties strengthen an anchor. Precision — an offer of 4,850,000 is more effective than 5 million, because precision implies a calculation and narrows the perceived range of adjustment. A rationale, however thin, since an anchor with a reason attached resists more. Early placement, before the other side has generated their own. And repetition, since an anchor restated is an anchor reinstalled.
The boundary is where the anchor is not merely aggressive but fabricated. A high opening price is a position. A list price constructed to mislead about market value, a damages demand calculated to intimidate rather than to state a claim, or a fabricated competing offer are all misrepresentations, and in several jurisdictions actionable ones. The line is whether the number stands for anything.
There is also a practical limit that operators forget: an anchor far outside the plausible range does not anchor, it insults. The target discounts it entirely and often revises their view of the counterparty.
The counter is chapter 309, and it is the most reliable defense in this part: generate your own number, in writing, before exposure.
Countered by Consider the Opposite