Anchoring effect
Etymology
Introduced by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in a 1974 Science paper on judgment under uncertainty, where people asked to estimate quantities stayed close to a random number they had just been shown. The metaphor is nautical — a dropped anchor holds a ship near one spot — repurposed to describe a mind that won’t drift far from its starting estimate.
noun · /ANG-ker-ing ih-FEKT/
The tendency for an initial number or reference point to pull later judgments toward it, even when that anchor is arbitrary or irrelevant.
What it names
It explains why the first price named in a negotiation, or the "was" price on a tag, quietly sets the terms of everything that follows.
Example
The agent listed high on purpose; the anchoring effect meant every counteroffer still orbited a number she had invented.
Related idea
The broader adjustment heuristic describes how we start from an anchor and adjust — usually too little; anchoring names the pull of that starting point itself.