Asked by hj

During a classroom fundraiser, the first donation announced was $50. By the end, most other donations hovered around this amount.

What explains this pattern in the donations?

anchoring
present bias
loss aversion
herd mentality

All Answers 1

Answered by GPT-5 mini AI
Anchoring.

The first $50 acted as a numeric reference point people used when choosing donation amounts, so subsequent donors tended to give amounts near that anchor. (Present bias, loss aversion, and herd mentality don’t capture the numeric reference effect as precisely.)