How Cornyn and Tillis Got Played by Trump

Todd Blanche’s nomination moves forward, thanks to the art of the outrageous demand.

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s inexplicable advancement of Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general—who is now, according to Politico’s Chris Marquette, only one vote shy of Senate confirmation—has me thinking about the anchoring effect, a topic explored by the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in their 1974 paper, “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” The piece is a foundational work in the field of behavioral economics; it led to Kahneman winning the Nobel prize for economics in 2002 (even though Kahneman wasn’t an economist).

“Heuristics” in this context means “mental shortcuts,” and Tversky and Kahneman spent their careers demonstrating that these tend to follow seriously bad logic. They were especially fond of showing how bad heuristics can be when it comes to math. If you haven’t read Michael Lewis’s delightful joint biography of Tversky and Kahneman and their ideas, The Undoing Project, published in 2016, I recommend it highly. Kahneman also popularized his research with Tversky in his 2011 best-seller, Thinking Fast and Slow. 

“In many situations,” Tversky and Kahneman wrote in their 1974 paper, “people make estimates by starting from an initial value that is adjusted to yield the final answer.” That’s anchoring. These initial estimates, Tversky and Kahneman, are pretty arbitrary and extremely susceptible to suggestion. In one experiment, they spun a wheel of fortune and then asked participants whether the percentage of United Nations delegations that represented African countries was higher or lower than that anchor number. They then invited participants to guess what the real number was. When the anchor number was higher, the guesses were higher, and when the anchor number was lower, the guesses were lower, even though the anchor numbers were arrived at through transparently arbitrary means and had zero bearing on the real answer (which, incidentally, is 28 percent).

Christopher Voss, a negotiation expert and author of 2016’s Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It, writes of extreme anchoring, citing Tversky and Kahneman and taking it one step further. If you’re negotiating over something and you let the other guy bid—that is, you let him anchor—then “you’ve got to........

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