Earlier I discussed the bewildering variety of priming effects, in which your thoughts and behavior may be influenced by stimuli to which you pay no attention at all, and even by stimuli of which you are completely unaware. The main moral of priming research is that our thoughts and our behavior are influenced, much more than we know or want, by

• Availability bias - the tendency to judge the likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant examples come to mind


• Confirmation bias - confirming what you expect to find by selectively accepting or ignoring information


• Affective bias - the tendency to make decisions based on what we wish were true

Anchors can even influence how you think your life is going. In one experiment, college students were asked two questions: (a) How happy are you? (b) How often are you dating?