u/No_Championship7751

Anchoring used to need a wheel of fortune and a made-up number (Tversky & Kahneman's classic experiment). Now it just needs an AI-generated first draft that nobody admits to using.

Picture the meeting: someone presents a tidy three-part framework as "here's what I've been thinking," everyone nods, feedback is positive. Except the framing, the assumptions, the argument structure were all decided by a model before the human touched the keyboard. What the human actually did was edit - and under-adjust from the anchor, same as we all reliably do.

The interesting part isn't that this happens. It's what it does to credit. The senior person "refining" a draft used to be doing real framing work; the junior person with the fastest prompting fingers can now produce the anchor everyone else adjusts around. Nobody in the room would call that a power transfer - it gets filed under "efficient collaboration." And credit for original thinking still flows to whoever typed the final version, even though the actual frame-setting happened upstream and invisibly.

I wrote a longer piece pulling this apart (self-assessments, performance reviews, and the "who actually wrote this" problem) if anyone wants to dig in further: https://medium.com/@nudgeintended/the-anchor-nobody-named-423b4931522d

Curious whether others here have seen this play out - the anchor shifting from "whoever's senior" to "whoever prompts fastest."

Data on unlimited PTO is in: employees on unlimited plans average around 13 days off a year, versus 15 for employees with a fixed allowance, and about a quarter take no PTO at all. It looks like a straightforward default problem. A fixed number of days does two jobs at once: it signals what's normal, and its expiration forces action. Remove the number and both signals disappear, so most people default to taking less rather than more.

It's basically the inverse of the retirement-savings default problem: instead of auto-enrolling people into a good default, unlimited PTO auto-enrolls them into no default at all. I wrote up the fuller breakdown, including how some companies are now reintroducing structure to fix it: https://medium.com/nudge-intended/the-unlimited-pto-paradox-8010c2bcabf9