Status quo bias

What it is

Status quo bias is a preference for leaving things as they are. When one option is the current state or the default, people choose it more often than they would if the same option were simply one choice among several (Samuelson & Zeckhauser, 1988).

Sticking with what you have is not always a mistake. It becomes a bias when the current option wins mainly because it is current, not because it is better.

An everyday example

Someone has paid for the same phone plan for six years. Prices have dropped, and a plan with more data now costs less. They have noticed this more than once, but switching means comparing offers, calling the provider and maybe changing a SIM card. Each month the old plan renews automatically, and each month “later” seems fine.

If they were choosing a plan from scratch today, they would almost certainly not pick the one they have.

Why it happens

Several forces push in the same direction:

• Effort and uncertainty. Changing takes time and thought, and the new option might disappoint.
• Losses loom larger than gains. What we might give up feels more important than what we might get (see loss aversion).
• Regret. A bad result after an active change tends to feel worse than a bad result after doing nothing.
• Defaults as advice. A preset option can look like a recommendation, so people treat it as the sensible choice (Madrian & Shea, 2001).

How to counter it

• Ask the fresh-start question: “If I were choosing today, with no current option, what would I pick?”
• Schedule reviews of recurring choices such as subscriptions, insurance and savings rates, for example once a year.
• Use the bias on purpose. Set helpful defaults for yourself, such as automatic transfers into savings, so inertia works for you.

What the research shows

Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988) gave people the same decision problems framed with or without an existing status quo. Options were chosen more often when presented as the status quo, and field data on university staff’s health and retirement plans showed similar stickiness.

A striking real-world case: when one US company switched its retirement savings plan from opt-in to automatic enrollment, participation rose sharply, and many new employees kept the default contribution rate and fund even though few had chosen them before (Madrian & Shea, 2001).

A preregistered replication of four of the original scenarios found the bias in three of them but not in the fourth, so the effect is robust but not universal (Xiao et al., 2021).