Heuristics and Biases in Audience Decision Making 231A follow-up study fi nds that jury deliberation fails to diminish the infl uence pretrial publicity has
on jurors’ verdicts.^274
Most audiences are highly susceptible to priming because they are easily infl uenced to inter-pret events with the communicator’s schema.^275 In court cases, the opening statements made by
prosecution and defense attorneys prime competing schemata in the minds of the jurors.^276 In this
situation, the longer opening statement tends to win the competition because it primes jurors with
a more complete schema for making sense of the case.
Primacy Effects: The Power of Being First to Frame an Issue
The schema the audience activates fi rst will unduly infl uence its decision. For example, shortly
before World War II began, Americans were asked if they should be allowed to join the German
army. Only 23% answered yes when the question was presented fi rst. However, 34% answered yes
when the question was presented after two questions that asked if Americans should be allowed to
join the French and the British armies.^277 The fi rst presentation order apparently activated a “loy-
alty and treason” schema. Americans should not help the enemy. The second presentation order,
on the other hand, activated a “freedom of choice” schema. Americans should be free to fi ght in
any army they choose.^278
Information Acquisition–Related Heuristics and Biases
The Anchoring and Availability Heuristics
Once an audience has activated a schema, it can then search for the value or information that
belongs in each slot of the schema. For example, the schema home buyers activate to decide
whether to purchase a new house likely includes a slot for the monetary value of the house. When
audiences allow a value that is easily acquired from an external source (e.g., a seller’s asking price of
$320,000) to unduly infl uence, or anchor, their estimate of the real slot value (e.g., the price that an
appraiser might calculate after investigating the current housing market), they are said to be using
the anchoring heuristic.^279
In addition to fi lling empty schema slots with values based on information that is easy to acquirefrom external sources, the audience may also fi ll those slots with information that is easy to imagine
or to retrieve from their memories. When audiences allow a value they can easily retrieve from
their memories or imaginations (e.g., the price of the last house they purchased) to unduly infl u-
ence their estimate of the actual slot value, they are said to be using the availability heuristic.^280
Information is easy for the audience to retrieve from memory if they paid close attention to it
when it was presented to them, if they fully comprehended it, and if they have been exposed to it
frequently.^281
Insuffi cient Adjustment: The Power of Easily Acquired Information
When easily acquired external information anchors an audience’s estimate of a schema slot value,
the audience rarely changes or adjusts the anchor’s value suffi ciently.^282 For example, managers often
use an employee’s salary of the past year as an anchor to determine the employee’s salary for the
upcoming year and rarely adjust the anchor suffi ciently to account for the employee’s more recent
performance.^283 Different anchors can yield different decisions about the same issue. For example,
in mock negotiations between buyers and sellers, a buyer’s initial offer can act as an anchor that
has a dramatic effect on the fi nal selling price, with very low initial offers leading sellers to sell at