Brian Stauffer/theispot.com
Say you walk into a car dealership determined to stay within budget. The salesperson shows you a car you like and quotes a price of $41,435. You know there’s room to negotiate, but when it’s time to counter, that first number quietly takes over. Your counteroffer, the concessions, and the final deal all end up orbiting around $41,435.
That’s anchoring at work. In negotiations, first offers become psychological reference points, and people often fail to adjust far enough away from them, even though they are free to counter with any amount they want.
Although the anchoring effect is well documented, what makes this bias so frustrating is that it persists even among skilled and experienced negotiators. It shows up in procurement, strategic deals, and executive compensation conversations — any situation in which one party gets a number on the table early and the other party must respond under time pressure.
If you’re preparing for an important negotiation, the standard advice is familiar: Do your homework, know your target, and don’t reveal too much too soon. Those suggestions are useful, but none of them changes the fact that when the first offer lands, your mind starts thinking of counteroffers close to that number. Our recent research, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, identified a simple way to reduce the anchoring effect when you don’t control the first offer: Adopt a choice mindset right when you see the first offer.
The Power of Choice Reminders
A choice mindset is a state of mind in which people perceive the availability of more choices than they are presented with. When in this mindset, people are more likely to recognize the options available to them, including nonobvious options (such as delaying a decision or changing the structure of a deal), particularly in situations in which they feel constrained (such as difficult negotiations).
In everyday life, a choice mindset is the difference between thinking “I have no choice; I have to take what I can get” and thinking “I have choices and can even consider options that have not been presented to me.” The key insight is that feeling constrained is not the same as being constrained, and the subjective perception of choice can be nudged.
When someone quotes a price of $41,435, your brain starts searching for a reasonable counter in the neighborhood of that number rather than exploring the full range of possible counteroffers. Our research tested the idea that a choice mindset can widen that search. The mechanism is cognitive: A choice reminder leads people to think of other potential counteroffers, which weakens the anchor’s dominance and helps negotiators move further away from the first offer.
We tested the effect of this reminder across seven studies with U.S. participants recruited through online research platforms. The intervention was intentionally minimal. In the choice condition, after seeing a seller’s quoted price, participants received a simple reminder that they could choose their offer (“You can choose to offer any amount that you want. It’s your choice!” for example). The control condition received standard negotiation instructions without that explicit choice reminder. The practical translation is straightforward: A small prompt pushed people to counter more aggressively and rely less on the seller’s opening number.
For example, in one of the studies, based on a used-car bargaining scenario, participants were shown cars along with detailed information and were quoted prices ranging from $15,599 to $19,781 — intentionally precise numbers because prior research suggests that precise first offers serve as potent anchors. As expected, the choice reminder reduced anchoring: Participants in the choice condition countered with lower offers than those in the control condition. The implication for leaders is that this isn’t just a trick for minor purchases; it can be applied in real negotiations, where the other side’s opening offer is presented as a carefully calculated figure.
Having More Options Helps Negotiators
Why is such a simple reminder so effective? We investigated the mechanism directly by measuring whether a choice reminder changes what negotiators think about before they commit to a counteroffer. In a study that tasked participants with negotiating the price of a painting, we asked participants to list all of the offers they could imagine making instead of a single figure. The choice reminder led participants to generate a small but significant increase in the number of counteroffer options. This matters because anchoring is fundamentally a cognitive spotlight problem: The anchor dominates the focus, and any nudge that expands the set of options you consider can loosen that grip.
We further tested whether simply thinking of more offers could trigger this de-anchoring, by randomly assigning participants to generate either two or eight potential offers before making their final counter. Generating eight offers significantly reduced anchoring, because of the breadth of the range they produced. Participants who generated eight offers produced a much wider set of options, and that variance statistically explained why their final counteroffer moved further away from the initial anchor. Ultimately, the way out of an anchor is not just grit or negotiation bravado; it hinges on widening the decision space before you make your move.
Negotiators in a choice mindset can avoid anchoring on first offers not only by generating more counteroffers but also by shifting the negotiation to other points of discussion. A book publisher negotiating with an agent who is asking for a $100,000 advance, for instance, can weaken the effect of the first offer by pivoting to negotiating other variables, such as royalty tiers and payment structures, thereby expanding the scope of the discussion and reframing an adversarial exchange into a collaborative problem-solving session.
This mechanism points to a simple practice you can use in negotiations. When the other side makes a first offer, you should aim to create a brief choice pause. This moment is not about theatrics; it’s about preventing the first number from becoming your default starting point. During this pause, try to think of multiple counteroffers that are within the bounds of reason, including a few that might appear aggressive but can still be defended based on relevant reference points. The goal is not to counter with the most aggressive number possible but to generate credible options that are not influenced by the first offer. If you have come to the negotiation table with your own first offer prepared, but your counterparty makes the first offer, rather than using their offer as a baseline for negotiations, counter with your preplanned first offer (and the accompanying rationale) even if it appears quite far from theirs.
This practice is even more effective when integrated into your preparation. Rather than just setting a single target and a walk-away point, prepare a set of counters that spans a meaningful range. This broader map protects you against the pull of a surprising anchor. By shifting the focus from a single point to a prebuilt range of possibilities, you change the tone of the internal deliberations before you ever respond externally.
How Distractions Can Derail Negotiations
There is an important caveat, and it’s one that will resonate with any executive who has had to negotiate a deal while juggling a dozen competing priorities: This strategy depends on attention and cognitive bandwidth. We predicted that if the choice reminder works by prompting people to think through more counteroffers, then it should be weaker when cognitive resources are constrained. That’s exactly what we found. In a study that used a divided-attention paradigm, participants negotiated while brand logos were flashed on the screen; they were asked to count certain logos, a task designed to mimic distraction and multitasking.
Under normal conditions, the choice reminder reduced anchoring. Under high cognitive load, the effect disappeared: Participants in the choice condition were just as anchored as those in the control condition.
This boundary condition has an immediate managerial implication. If you want to benefit from a choice mindset, you can’t treat negotiation as a task you do while triaging email, scanning Slack, or squeezing a call into a depleted part of your day. The moment you receive the first offer is exactly when you need enough bandwidth to generate alternatives. When you’re distracted, your mind reverts to the easiest available path, which is to negotiate around the anchor. In practice, that may mean setting norms (such as “We don’t counter on the spot for high-stakes deals”) or simply buying time (like asking for a short break or a follow-up call) so that you can do the brief work of generating your set of counteroffers.
We also tested and ruled out an alternative explanation that leaders sometimes assume: that a choice reminder simply makes people more self-interested or more motivated to win, leading them to make tougher offers. In one study, we measured motivation to get a low price and perceived task importance. Those measures did not differ between conditions, even though the choice reminder still reduced anchoring.
That pattern is consistent with a cognitive understanding of negotiation: The choice nudge changes how people think, not just how hard they want to bargain.
The implication is that a choice mindset is most useful when you already know which way you want to move (price down, salary up, liability down, scope up, and so on). When the right direction is uncertain, you should pair this approach with independent benchmarks and analysis so that you’re not simply widening the range without clarifying your strategic aim.
Anchoring is one of those biases that is easy to recognize in others but hard to avoid, especially because it operates in the flow of everyday work life. Yet the practical lesson from our research is encouraging: You don’t always need complex negotiation tactics to reduce it. Sometimes you just need a tiny moment of cognitive reframing. When you remind yourself that you have a choice, you’re more likely to generate alternatives, expand the range of possible counters, and move further away from the first number put in front of you.
The next time you receive a first offer, whether it’s from a supplier, a job candidate, a partner, or a counterpart in a strategic deal, try the following steps:
- Pause to consider the offer. Ask your counterpart for a moment to think.
- Remind yourself: I have a choice.
- Give yourself just enough time to create a few options for a counteroffer before you pick one.
In many negotiations, that small shift can be the difference between your counteroffer being anchored to the initial offer and setting your own terms. Indeed, research has found that the most likely outcome is the midpoint between the first offer and the first counteroffer.
Once you have a counteroffer in mind, you can draw from other research that has identified some best practices for ensuring that the negotiation that follows is successful. Aim to shift the conversation from haggling over a number to building a shared rationale for concluding a deal. When sharing your counteroffer, make the underlying criteria explicit (using market comparables, outside options, or precedents, for example), and invite the other side to respond with alternative objective criteria rather than a competing anchor. If several terms are on the table, move quickly from a single counter to two or three package offers that are equally attractive to you but trade price against other issues; this helps surface priorities and unlocks value. Then concede slowly and deliberately, labeling each concession and tying it to a reciprocal move so that the negotiation stays organized around your counteroffer rather than drifting back toward the original offer. All of this is made possible by a brief moment of cognitive reframing — pausing to remind yourself that you have a choice — that loosens the anchor’s grip and lets you negotiate on your own terms.