[2] Further non-rational cognitive processes include existence bias, endowment effect, longevity, mere exposure, and regret avoidance.
Behaviour in regard to economics, retirement plans, health, and ethical choices show evidence of the status quo bias.
[1] Results of the experiment further show that status quo bias advantage relatively increases with the number of alternatives given within the choice set.
In this case, the opening passage continued: "A significant portion of this portfolio is invested in a moderate risk company ... (The tax and broker commission consequences of any changes are insignificant.)"
[7] Automotive insurance consumers: The US states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania inadvertently ran a real-life experiment providing evidence of status quo bias in the early 1990s.
Johnson, Hershey, Meszaros and Kunreuther (1993) conducted a questionnaire to test whether consumers will stay with the default option for car insurance.
The impact of status quo bias was determined as making attempts to channel consumers away from the general practitioner they are currently seeing a daunting task.
[10] Status quo bias has been attributed to a combination of loss aversion and the endowment effect, two ideas relevant to prospect theory.
[1] Loss aversion, therefore, cannot wholly explain the status quo bias,[11] with other potential causes including regret avoidance,[11] transaction costs[12] and psychological commitment.
Because some errors are more costly than others (Haselton & Nettle, 2006),[13] sticking with what worked in the past is a safe option, as long as previous decisions are "good enough".
Moreover, mental effort needed to maintain status quo alternatives would often be lesser and easier, resulting in a superior choice's benefit being outweighed by decision-making cognitive costs.
[25] Overall implications of a study conducted by Ilana Ritov and Jonathan Baron, regarding status quo and omission biases, reveal that omission bias may further be diagnosed when the decision maker is unwilling to take preference from any of the available options given to them, thus enabling reduction of the number of decisions where utility comparison and weight is unavoidable.
A selective increase in sub-thalamic nucleus (STN) activity was found when the status quo was rejected in the face of heightened decision difficulty.
Analysis of effective connectivity showed that inferior frontal cortex, a region more active for difficult decisions, exerted an enhanced modulatory influence on the STN during switches away from the status quo.
[27] Research by University College London scientists that examines the neural pathways involved in 'status quo bias' in the human brain and found that the more difficult the decision we face, the more likely we are not to act.
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), looked at the decision-making of participants taking part in a tennis 'line judgement' game while their brains were scanned using functional MRI (fMRI).
This is due to individuals who are mainly risk-averse who seek to attain greater expected utility and decreased subjective uncertainty in making their decision.
[30] Status-quo educational bias can be both a barrier to political progress and a threat to the state's legitimacy and argue that the values of stability, compliance, and patriotism underpin important reasons for status quo bias that appeal not to the substantive merits of existing institutions but merely to the fact that those institutions are the status quo.
[31] The status quo bias is seen in important real life decisions; it has been found to be prominent in data on selections of health care plans and retirement programs.
[1] There is a belief that preference for the status quo represents a core component of conservative ideology in societies where government power is limited and laws restricting actions of individuals exist.
[32] Conversely, in liberal societies, movements to impose restrictions on individuals or governments are met with widespread opposition by those that favor the status quo.
They may simply not know the full extent of the arguments against the status quo or may not be able to present an unbiased account of each side because of their personal biases.
[37] A study in 1986 examined the effect of status quo bias on those planning their retirement savings when given the yearly choice between two investment funds.
Even though the two funds had vastly different returns in both absolute and relative terms, the majority of participants never switched the preferences across the trial period.
Status quo bias was also more evident in older participants as they preferred to stay with their original investment, rather than switching as new information came to light.
Bergers reveal that status quo bias within the former price management process phase potentially led to complete reliance on external information sources that existed traditionally.
[41] An empirical study conducted by Alexandre Kempf and Stefan Ruenzi examined the presence of status quo bias within the U.S. equity mutual fund market, and the extent in which this depends on the number of alternatives given.
[44] Using real data obtained from the U.S. mutual fund market, this study reveals status quo bias influences fund investors, in which a stronger correlation for positive dependence of status quo bias was found when the number of alternatives was larger, and therefore confirms Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988) experimental results.
This results in the status quo option providing less uncertainty and higher expected utility for risk-averse decision makers.
[45] Status quo bias is compounded by loss aversion theory where consumers see disadvantages as larger than advantages when making decision away from the reference point.