Status quo distortion

The status quo bias (also called the status quo tendency ) is a cognitive bias that leads to an excessive preference for the status quo over change. In other words, people want things to stay roughly the way they are.

The matter has been explored in a variety of disciplines, including political science and economics .

Daniel Kahneman , Richard Thaler and Jack Knetsch carried out experiments that reliably achieved this effect. They attribute the tendency to a combination of loss aversion and the endowment effect - two of the leading ideas in Prospect Theory .

A very similar phenomenon (bias) is the default effect .

See also

• Omission bias
• Endowment effect
• Social norm

literature

• W. Samuelson, RJ Zeckhauser: Status quo bias in decision making . In: Journal of Risk and Uncertainty . tape 1 , 1988, p. 7-59 , doi : 10.1007 / BF00055564 .
• D. Kahneman, JL Knetsch, RH Thaler: Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias . In: Journal of Economic Perspectives . tape 5 , no. 1 , 1991, p. 193–206 ( Online [PDF; 3.7 MB ]).
• EJ Johnson, J. Hershey, J. Meszaros, H. Kunreuther: Framing, Probability Distortions, and Insurance Decisions . In: Journal of Risk and Uncertainty . tape 7 , 1993, pp. 35–51 , doi : 10.1007 / BF01065313 ( Online [PDF; 3.4 MB ]).