Fix your criteria, budget, walk-away point, or answer in writing before you see the offer, the anchor, or the pressure, so that the decision is made by the cool version of you.

How to do it

1. 1Before the showroom, the negotiation, the pitch, or the search results, write your maximum price, your must-haves, and the conditions under which you will say no.
2. 2Decide what evidence would make you change each criterion. If nothing would, say so; if something would, write it down.
3. 3Share the written criteria with someone who will hold you to them, or keep them where you will see them during the decision.
4. 4When the anchor arrives (the sticker price, the first offer, the "normally $X"), compare it to your number, not the other way around.
5. 5If you want to break your own rule, require a written reason and a night of sleep, which is the 24-hour rule applied to yourself.

When to use it

• •Negotiations where the other side speaks first and sets an anchor.
• •Shopping with reference prices, "was/now" tags, or premium decoys that make a mid-tier option look reasonable.
• •Reviewing evidence, applicants, or data where you have a stake in the outcome.
• •Investment or gambling situations where the interface is built to keep you in.

Counters

Evidence and how strong it is

Pre-commitment is the standard remedy in the anchoring literature: anchors shift judgments even when people know they are arbitrary (Tversky & Kahneman 1974), and being warned about anchors helps little, whereas having an independent target or reservation value blunts the effect. Galinsky & Mussweiler (2001) showed that negotiators who focused on their own target or on the opponent's alternatives were largely immune to first-offer anchoring. The same logic underlies pre-registration in science and "Ulysses contracts" in behavioral economics, where a planner self binds a doer self (Thaler & Shefrin 1981). Evidence strength: strong for the underlying effect and for the negotiation version; the everyday consumer version is an application of those findings rather than a separately tested program.

1. Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124-1131 · link
   The original demonstration that arbitrary anchors shift numerical judgments, which is the effect pre-commitment guards against.
2. Galinsky, A. D., & Mussweiler, T. (2001). First Offers as Anchors: The Role of Perspective-Taking and Negotiator Focus. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(4), 657-669 · link
   Experiments showing that negotiators who focus on their own target or alternatives before hearing a first offer are protected from its anchoring effect.
3. Thaler, R. H., & Shefrin, H. M. (1981). An Economic Theory of Self-Control. Journal of Political Economy, 89(2), 392-406
   The planner-doer model that formalizes why binding yourself in advance improves choices made under temptation.