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How to Master Anchoring & Improve Your Negotiation Skills
Anchoring happens all the time. Learn to recognize it and use it to your advantage.
If you don’t know what anchoring is, I have a fun survey for you. Please only take the quiz if you don’t know what anchoring is, and only before reading the article.
Think about a chore on your to-do list but just haven’t had time to complete. Now, imagine I have a tool that can do it for you; you never have to worry about it again. It costs $500. Would you buy it? If not, what would your counteroffer be?
What I just described is a situation where I used anchoring to my advantage. While anchoring is an effective negotiation tactic, it derives from a grander tendency of human minds — we tend to build our decisions and next steps around the most recent information. When it comes to negotiation, it’s like exerting a psychological gravity, pulling your counterpart towards your way of thinking.
The implications of anchoring imply that negotiation is a human process. A human…
