This is the most commercially consequential item in the series so far, and it is also the one where the popular treatment is furthest from the source. The 1988 paper that named status quo bias devotes a substantial part of its analysis to circumstances in which staying put is the correct decision, and almost nobody who cites it mentions that.
Key Takeaway
From the founding abstract: "A series of decision-making experiments shows that individuals disproportionately stick with the status quo. Data on the selections of health plans and retirement programs by faculty members reveal that the status quo bias is substantial in important real decisions."[1] A later review records that the same authors conceptualise "three different categories of explanation approaches to this bias: cognitive misperception, rational decision making, and psychological commitment"[2]. A pre-registered replication found "strong empirical support for the status quo bias in three decision scenarios out of the four"[3].
The Verdict, Stated First
Five claims, in descending order of confidence.
One. The effect is real and has replicated under modern standards. Two pre-registered experiments with 311 and 316 participants found strong support in three of four scenarios drawn from the original. That is a better replication record than most findings in this series.
Two. One of the founding paper's own three explanations is that staying is rational. This is not a critic's objection; it is a category in the original framework. A firm accused of status quo bias may simply be facing switching costs, and the literature says so.
Three. The one scenario that failed to replicate is the one with no switching costs. The bias held for budget allocation, investment portfolios and job offers, and did not hold for choosing the colour of a wagon. We think that pattern is diagnostic between the competing explanations, and we flag that reading as ours.
Four. The commercially useful move is arithmetic, not psychological. Declining a saving of $5,000 a year over three years is an implicit assertion that switching costs at least $12,885. That claim is testable, and almost no firm writes it down.
Five. One of the three explanations rests on a finding this publication has already corrected. The cognitive misperception account leans on loss aversion, whose magnitude the fortieth article in this series withdrew a claim about. That uncertainty propagates here, and we are obliged to say so.
Our Grades For These Claims
Applying the scheme from the first article in this series.
Grade A that the effect exists in decision scenarios. An original with 486 participants across eight scenarios and a pre-registered replication with over 600 participants supporting three of four.
Grade B for the field evidence. The abstract describes substantial bias in health plan and retirement selections by faculty members, and we did not obtain the analysis, the sample sizes, or the magnitudes.
Grade A for the three-category explanatory framework, which is attributed to the original by a peer-reviewed review that we obtained.
Grade C for the relative weight of the three explanations, which is exactly what nobody has established and which determines every practical implication.
Grade A for the switching-cost arithmetic, which is not empirical.
Our position: this is a well-behaved literature whose central practical question has been systematically discarded in transmission. The question is not whether people stay. It is which of three reasons they stay for, because the three have opposite implications.
A Note On Method
Everything here is verified to August 2026.
We obtained the 1988 paper's abstract verbatim from four independent sources, including the publisher and the second author's own institutional page[1][4][5]. We did not obtain the paper, which runs to 53 pages and is behind a subscription; we report none of its experimental results, magnitudes or field data figures.
We obtained the replication's abstract verbatim from two independent sources plus a passage of its discussion[3][6]. We did not obtain its results.
The three-category framework and the countermeasure count come from a peer-reviewed literature review we obtained in part[2].
The switching-cost taxonomy comes from an academic preprint's literature review of the information systems field[7], not from primary sources.
All arithmetic is ours and uses invented figures throughout.
This article discusses research on decision making. It is not procurement, contracting, pricing or investment advice.
The Paper
The citation and the claim.
Samuelson, W., and Zeckhauser, R. (1988), Status Quo Bias in Decision Making, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1(1), 7–59, DOI 10.1007/BF00055564[1].
The abstract in full: "Most real decisions, unlike those of economics texts, have a status quo alternative, that is, doing nothing or maintaining one's current or previous decision. A series of decision-making experiments shows that individuals disproportionately stick with the status quo. Data on the selections of health plans and retirement programs by faculty members reveal that the status quo bias is substantial in important real decisions. Economics, psychology, and decision theory provide possible explanations for this bias. Applications are discussed ranging from marketing techniques, to industrial organization, to the advance of science."[1]
Four observations, ours.
The opening sentence is the paper's real contribution and it is a criticism of economics rather than of people. Textbook decisions have no incumbent option. Real ones almost always do, and a theory that omits the option of doing nothing has omitted the option most frequently taken.
Note the sequencing: experiments first, then field data. The paper does not rest on hypothetical scenarios, which distinguishes it from most of what this series has covered.
"Economics, psychology, and decision theory provide possible explanations" is doing more work than it appears to. Three disciplines, three explanations, and the rest of this article is about why that matters.
And the applications listed run "from marketing techniques, to industrial organization, to the advance of science." A paper claiming relevance to how science itself progresses is making an unusually broad claim, and we did not obtain that section.
Four Hundred And Eighty-Six Students
The experimental design, described by a later paper.
The authors "performed controlled experiments using a questionnaire, containing a series of eight choice problems which they called decision scenarios. The participants in the experiments were students enrolled in economics classes at Boston University School of Management and at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. A total of 486 students took part in the study. The results of this experiments showed pronounced status-quo bias."[8]
We did not obtain the original paper and report this description at one remove.
Three observations, ours.
The method is the one this series has come to trust least, which is hypothetical scenarios administered to students. Eight problems, 486 undergraduates and graduate students, all in economics or policy programmes.
The design principle, however, is sound and worth stating. A later description sets it out: a scenario is presented either with no option labelled as current, or with one option labelled as current, and the labels are rotated[9]. Any shift in the choice distribution is attributable to the label alone.
And 486 is a large sample for 1988. This series has repeatedly reported foundational studies with nine or twenty per cell; this one is an order of magnitude better.
And Then The Real Decisions
The part that lifts this above the laboratory, and the part we could not obtain.
The abstract states: "Data on the selections of health plans and retirement programs by faculty members reveal that the status quo bias is substantial in important real decisions."[1]
We did not obtain this analysis. We have one sentence describing it, and no sample size, no magnitude, no method and no identification strategy.
Three observations, ours.
The design is exactly right in principle. Health plan and retirement elections are real, consequential, repeated, and administratively recorded, which makes them among the best natural settings available for this question.
The word "substantial" is the paper's own and it is the only magnitude we have. We report it and grade the field evidence B on that basis.
And we would note a structural caution that applies to any such analysis and which we cannot check: people who do not switch plans may differ from people who do in ways other than inertia, and separating a bias from a preference in observational data is exactly the problem the twenty-seventh article encountered with automatic enrolment.
Three Categories Of Explanation
The framework that makes this article possible, and the part that vanishes in transmission.
A peer-reviewed literature review records: the authors "conceptualize that there are three different categories of explanation approaches to this bias: cognitive misperception, rational decision making, and psychological commitment."[2]
Four observations, ours.
Read the middle category again. Rational decision making is not a critic's rebuttal bolted on later. It is one of three explanatory families in the original framework.
Which means the founding paper on status quo bias explicitly contemplates that a substantial share of status quo behaviour is not a bias at all, and the popular version of the finding has discarded a third of its own analysis.
The three categories have opposite practical implications. If it is misperception, you correct the framing. If it is rational, you leave it alone. If it is commitment, you change who decides. A single label covering all three cannot tell you which to do.
And this is the twenty-eighth article's problem in its most expensive form. One name, three mechanisms, three remedies, and the name is what travels.
One: Cognitive Misperception
The first category, and the one everyone means when they say status quo bias.
The same review states: "Here, Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988) primarily refer to the concept of loss aversion established by Kahneman and Tversky (1979). In their experiments, Kahneman and Tversky were able to show that losses loom larger than gains in the value perception of individuals as a part of prospect theory. They found that individuals tend to forego substantial gains out of fear of minor losses."[2]
Three observations, ours.
The mechanism is clean. Switching converts the current arrangement into a loss and the new one into a gain, and if losses weigh more, the comparison is tilted before any facts are considered.
Another source describes the same category in the original's own terms, saying status quo bias "stems partly from a mental illusion and partly from psychological inclination."[7]
And a related account records that "the status quo often serves as a reference point against which other alternatives are evaluated"[10], which is the formal statement of the same idea and connects directly to the prospect theory literature.
Loss Aversion Is Only One Of Three
A qualification the review states explicitly and which this publication is obliged to take seriously.
The review continues: "However, following Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988), loss aversion is only one of three explanation approaches for SQB. Thus, for certain situations, the other two aspects of SQB might have more explanation potential."[2]
Three observations, ours, and the third is uncomfortable.
The originators did not claim loss aversion explained it all, and a review published decades later reiterates that the other two categories may dominate in particular situations.
Which is the correct structure for an explanation of a behaviour with heterogeneous causes, and it is the structure the ninth, twenty-ninth and fifty-second articles in this series all arrived at independently.
And here is the part we cannot avoid. The fortieth article in this series withdrew a claim that loss aversion is among the most robustly replicated results in behavioural economics, after a 2018 review in a peer-reviewed journal argued that current evidence does not support losses being on balance more impactful than gains, and drew a formal published dialogue. If the magnitude of loss aversion is contested, then the cognitive misperception account of status quo bias inherits that uncertainty, and we would be inconsistent to report it here without saying so.
Two: Rational Decision Making
The category that changes what a business should do with all of this.
An academic review of the information systems literature sets out the components. On transition costs: they are "incurred during the adaptation to the new situation and may enhance SQB if switching costs exceed the efficiency gain associated with a new alternative."[7]
On uncertainty costs: they "represent the psychological uncertainty or perception of risk associated with switching to a new situation. In addition, the individual's lack of information and expertise about the alternatives may impose search and analysis costs and lead to SQB."[7]
The same source describes the underlying process: "Before making a switch to a new alternative, a decision maker goes through a rational decision-making process whereby the consideration of the difference between relative costs and benefits of change takes place."[7]
Four observations, ours.
Transition costs are real money: implementation, retraining, data migration, parallel running, contract exit. A firm that stays because these exceed the gain is not exhibiting a bias; it is doing the arithmetic correctly.
Search and analysis costs are also real, and they are the ones most often omitted. Evaluating three alternative suppliers properly consumes senior time that has an opportunity cost, and that cost is incurred whether or not you switch.
The replication paper's own discussion makes the same point about high-uncertainty settings, noting that "on such occasions where decision makers have a high degree of uncertainty, maintaining the status quo is a safe and hence rational choice"[6].
And the practical consequence is the one this article is named for. The rational account is not a defence you assert. It is an arithmetic claim you can check, and the section below shows how.
Three: Psychological Commitment
The third category, which is the one that most resembles the sunk cost literature.
A bibliography describes this category as covering "drives to reduce cognitive dissonance or maintain self-consistency with past choices."[9]
The information systems review lists the operationalised constructs used in that field: transition costs, sunk costs, regret avoidance, inertia, and uncertainty costs[9].
Three observations, ours.
Sunk costs and regret avoidance appear on that list, which places this category in direct contact with the fifty-second article in this series and with the anticipated regret literature.
Self-consistency with past choices is the escalation mechanism under a different name. A person defending a supplier they selected is defending a decision, not an arrangement.
And this is the category where changing who decides is the effective remedy, because the mechanism is attached to the person rather than to the situation. That is a different intervention from correcting a framing or from doing the arithmetic.
The Pre-Registered Replication
What happened when a modern team tested it, and this is unusually good evidence.
Xiao and colleagues published Revisiting status quo bias: Replication of Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988) in Meta-Psychology[3].
Its abstract: "Status quo bias refers to people's general preference to stick to, or continue with, a previously chosen option. In two pre-registered experiments with U.S. participants recruited from the Amazon Mechanical Turk (n1 = 311, n2 = 316), we attempted to replicate four decision scenarios (Question 1, 2, 4, and 6) from Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988), the seminal article that provided the first experimental demonstration of the status quo bias."[3]
Three observations, ours.
Two pre-registered experiments, 627 participants combined. That is more than the original across four of its eight scenarios, and pre-registration removes the analytic flexibility this series has repeatedly identified as the problem.
The team includes Gilad Feldman, whose group also produced the outcome bias replication reported in the forty-fourth article of this series. The published author contribution statement records that he "supervised each step of this project, conducted the pre-registrations, and collected the data"[6].
And the journal is Meta-Psychology, which publishes replications as its purpose. The existence of such venues is why the replication record in this series has improved across the articles covering more recent work.
Three Of Four
The result.
"We found strong empirical support for the status quo bias in three decision scenarios out of the four, including budget allocation (Scenario 1/Question 1 in the original article), investment portfolios (Scenario 3/Question 2), and college jobs (Scenario 4/Question 4). However, we failed to find substantial support for the status quo bias in the wagon color choice scenario (Scenario 2/Question 6)."[3]
From the discussion: "Our results were mostly consistent with the original findings. We found support for the status quo bias in three scenarios but weak-to-no support in the remaining one. In addition, our results suggest that the magnitude of the bias varied depending on the decision-making" scenario, with our source truncating[6].
Four observations, ours.
The three that held are budget allocation, investment portfolios and job offers. All three are consequential decisions with real costs attached to changing course.
The one that failed is choosing a wagon's colour.
The authors report that magnitude varied by scenario, which is the finding that matters most for anyone applying this and which we cannot quantify because we did not obtain the results.
And a later paper records that the replication has itself been relied upon in selecting scenarios, noting that budget allocation, investment portfolios and college job selection "demonstrated a consistent Status Quo bias in the original experiments as well as in a recent replication", and that changing the medium from paper to an online survey tool "did not affect the replication"[11].
The Scenario That Failed
The null result, and we think it is the most informative thing in this article.
Three observations, ours, and we flag that the reading is our inference and not the replication authors' claim.
Choosing the colour of a wagon has no transition cost, no uncertainty cost, no search cost, no sunk cost and no career consequence. Every component of the rational category is absent by construction.
Which makes it the scenario in which the rational decision making account predicts the smallest bias, because there is nothing rational to weigh.
And it is the scenario in which the bias did not appear.
Why That Failure Is Diagnostic
Following that through, carefully, because it is a stronger claim than it first appears and we want to state both what it supports and what it does not. Ours.
Four points.
The three categories make different predictions about a costless choice. The rational account predicts little or no bias, since there is nothing to be rational about. The cognitive misperception account, resting on loss aversion, predicts a bias anyway, because a reference point is a reference point regardless of stakes. The psychological commitment account also predicts a bias, since self-consistency does not require the choice to matter.
So a null result in the costless scenario is evidence for the rational account and against the other two, at least for that scenario. That is a genuine piece of information and it emerged from a replication that was not designed to produce it.
Now the honest counter-considerations, which we think weaken the inference without destroying it. A colour choice may simply be one where people have genuine, strong preferences, so a null could reflect preference strength rather than the absence of switching costs. And the failure to detect an effect is not the same as demonstrating its absence, particularly in one scenario.
And we would state the conclusion at the strength we think it holds: the pattern is consistent with the rational account carrying substantial weight in consequential decisions, and it is not a demonstration. The relative weight of the three explanations remains, on our reading, the open question that determines every practical recommendation in this field.
When Staying Is Correct
The calculation the rational category implies, which nobody in the literature we obtained performs for a business reader. Our own arithmetic, invented figures, an eight percent discount rate chosen by us, and no source states any of it.
A switch would save S per year. It costs C once. You expect the arrangement to last N years. Staying is correct when C exceeds the present value of the savings.
A saving of $5,000 a year over three years is worth $12,885 today.
The same saving over seven years: $26,032.
$15,000 a year over three years: $38,656. Over seven: $78,096.
$40,000 a year over five years: $159,708.
Three observations.
The horizon does more work than most people expect. Doubling the horizon roughly doubles the justified switching cost, which means a decision that looks marginal on a three-year view is often clear on a seven-year one.
And the reverse holds, which matters for a firm being sold a change: a saving that only pays back over seven years is a seven-year commitment, and most supplier relationships and software choices are not stable for that long.
The figures above are the break-even switching cost. Below it, switch. Above it, staying is not a bias. It is the answer.
The Number Nobody Writes Down
The move we would actually recommend, and it inverts the usual question. Ours.
Nobody knows their switching cost. So do not try to estimate it. Instead, read it off the decision you have already made.
Declining a saving of $2,000 a year on a three-year horizon asserts switching costs at least $5,154.
Declining $5,000 a year asserts at least $12,885.
Declining $10,000 asserts at least $25,771.
Declining $25,000 asserts at least $64,427.
Declining $50,000 asserts at least $128,855.
Four observations.
Each of those is a claim about your own operation, and unlike the psychology it is checkable. Would migrating actually cost sixty-four thousand dollars? Someone in the building knows roughly.
The question converts an argument about motives into an argument about facts, which is the pattern this series has found effective throughout. You are no longer asking whether a colleague is biased. You are asking what they think migration costs.
Most of the time the implied figure will be defensible, and that is the point. The exercise is not designed to catch people out; it is designed to make an unstated number visible so it can be discussed.
And when the implied figure is plainly absurd, you have found something. A firm declining fifty thousand a year is asserting a switching cost of over a hundred and twenty-eight thousand, and if nobody can construct that number, the rational explanation has been eliminated and the other two remain.
What Never Re-Testing Costs
The slower version of the same problem, which is the one that actually erodes a firm. Our own arithmetic; the four percent figure is invented, is not a forecast, and appears in no source.
Suppose re-testing the market each year would find a four percent saving on a $250,000 cost base, and you never do it.
After one year the gap is $10,000. After two, $29,600 cumulative. After three, $58,416. After five, $142,236. After eight, $328,337.
Three observations.
The shape matters more than the numbers. Nothing goes wrong in any individual year, and the cumulative gap exceeds the annual cost base by year eight.
This is structurally identical to the thirty-ninth article's finding about fees held flat during inflation. A loss that arrives as an absence is invisible in the accounts, because the line item does not move.
And it has the same remedy, which is a scheduled review rather than a triggered one. If the review only happens when someone complains, it happens after the erosion rather than instead of it.
The Five Costs Of Switching
The checklist implied by the literature, assembled from the information systems review's constructs. Ours in assembly, theirs in content.
The field operationalises switching-related status quo constructs as transition costs, sunk costs, regret avoidance, inertia, and uncertainty costs[9].
Five observations, one per construct.
Transition costs are legitimate and countable: migration, retraining, parallel running, exit fees. These belong in C.
Uncertainty costs are legitimate and harder. The risk that the alternative underperforms is real, and a risk premium belongs in the calculation, though naming it as a number rather than a feeling is the discipline.
Search and analysis costs belong in C as well, and they are the ones most often ignored. Senior time spent evaluating is spent whether or not you move.
Sunk costs do not belong in C at all, and the fifty-second article in this series sets out why at length. What you have already spent on the incumbent is irrelevant in both directions.
And regret avoidance and inertia are not costs. They are the psychological commitment category, and including them in a business case is how a preference gets laundered into a calculation.
A Family Of Four Effects
The wider context, from a review the replication paper cites.
A review is described as relating findings across disciplines and uncovering "4 decision avoidance effects... choice deferral, status quo bias, omission bias, and inaction inertia", related by "common antecedents and consequences in a rational-emotional model of the factors that predispose humans to do nothing." Its prominent components are given as "cost-benefit calculations, anticipated regret, and selection difficulty."[6]
We did not obtain this review and report the description.
Three observations, ours.
Status quo bias is one of four distinct routes to doing nothing, and they are not interchangeable. Choice deferral is postponing; omission bias is preferring harms caused by inaction; inaction inertia is declining an opportunity because a better one was missed earlier.
A firm diagnosing why a decision did not get made needs to know which of the four it is facing, because postponement and preference for inaction have different fixes.
And note that cost-benefit calculation is named as a prominent component of the model, again placing rational analysis inside the framework rather than opposite it.
Four Measures, Thirteen Countermeasures
What a recent review found when it went looking for solutions.
The review states its motivation: "In today's world, technological advances require nearly constant change within organizations. Thus, SQB can become an issue when it hinders progress. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how this effect can be reliably measured and, even more importantly, what countermeasures to employ. Prior research has focused more on individual measuring approaches and less on countermeasures."[2]
Its result: the authors "identify four measurement approaches and 13 countermeasures along the three aspects of cognitive misperception, rational decision making, and psychological commitment."[2]
We did not obtain the countermeasures and report only that thirteen were identified and that they are organised by the three categories.
Three observations, ours.
That the countermeasures are organised by category is the review's most useful structural choice, and it confirms the point this article has been making: the remedy depends on which explanation applies.
The admission that prior research focused more on measurement than on countermeasures is candid and familiar. This series has found the same imbalance in most literatures it has covered.
And we would rather report that thirteen countermeasures exist and that we could not obtain them than paraphrase a list we have not read. That is a gap, it sits exactly where a practitioner would want help, and naming it is the honest option.
What Actually Survives
Our reading, stated directly.
Five statements.
The effect is real in consequential decisions. Replicated pre-registered in three of four scenarios with 627 participants, and supported by field data we could not examine.
It is not one thing. Three explanatory categories, one of which is that staying is correct, all named in the original.
The relative weight of the three is unestablished, and it determines everything a firm would do about it.
The magnitude varies by scenario, on the replication's own discussion, and it disappeared entirely in the one scenario with no switching costs.
And the cognitive misperception account inherits an uncertainty from the loss aversion literature that this publication has already reported and corrected itself over.
Your Customers Stay For A Reason
The commercial application on the revenue side. Ours, untested.
Four points.
Client retention is status quo behaviour, and which of the three explanations holds determines how durable it is.
If clients stay because of genuine transition costs, that is a moat. It is stable, it survives a competitor's marketing, and it can be deliberately strengthened by integration and by holding data the client needs.
If they stay because of uncertainty about alternatives, that is a moat made of ignorance, and it dissolves the moment a competitor makes the comparison easy.
And if they stay because of psychological commitment, being consistency with a past decision, that is the most fragile of the three, because it can be broken by a single triggering event and often is. A retention rate is not a number. It is a mixture of three mechanisms with different half-lives, and a firm that has not asked which it has does not know what it owns.
And So Do You
The same analysis pointed inward, which is the uncomfortable direction. Ours.
Four questions we would put to any firm's cost base.
Which arrangements have never been re-tested? Not reviewed, re-tested against a live alternative quote. The two are different and only one produces a number.
What switching cost are you implicitly asserting? Take the saving you are declining, compute the present value on your actual horizon, and see whether anyone can construct that figure.
Who selected the incumbent, and are they in the room? If the psychological commitment category applies, the person defending the arrangement is defending a decision, and the remedy is procedural.
And is the review scheduled or triggered? A triggered review happens after the erosion. On our own illustrative arithmetic, eight years of a four percent annual gap on a $250,000 base accumulates to over $328,000, with nothing visibly going wrong in any single year.
The Asymmetry That Matters
The observation we would leave a commercial reader with. Ours.
Three points.
Status quo bias in your customers is an asset, and understanding which of the three mechanisms produces it tells you how much the asset is worth and how it can be lost.
Status quo bias in your own cost base is a liability, and it accrues silently because nothing on the income statement moves when a supplier quietly stops being competitive.
And most firms manage the first attentively and the second not at all, which is a reasonable allocation of attention if the effect were small and an expensive one if it is not. The literature says the effect is substantial in important real decisions. It does not say which of yours.
What To Do
Stop treating staying as evidence of bias. One of the founding paper's three explanatory categories is that staying is rational, and the popular version of this finding has discarded it.
Ask which of the three explanations applies. Cognitive misperception calls for correcting a framing, rational decision making calls for leaving it alone, and psychological commitment calls for changing who decides.
Read the implied switching cost off the decision. Declining a $10,000 annual saving on a three-year horizon asserts that switching costs at least $25,771, and someone in your building can check that.
Put search and analysis time into the switching cost. It is incurred whether or not you move, and it is the component most often left out of the comparison.
Keep sunk costs out of it entirely. What you have already spent on the incumbent belongs in no version of the calculation, in either direction.
Schedule the review rather than triggering it. A triggered review arrives after the erosion, and on our own illustrative figures the erosion is invisible year by year.
Ask which mechanism holds your customers. Transition costs are a durable moat, uncertainty about alternatives is a moat made of ignorance, and psychological commitment breaks on a single event.
Note that the bias vanished where switching was free. The one scenario that failed to replicate was a colour choice, which is our own reading of a null result and not the replication authors' claim.
The Limits Of This Analysis
Several caveats matter. This article discusses research on decision making and is not procurement, contracting, pricing or investment advice; the commercial sections are our own reasoning, supported by no study we obtained, and untested. Everything is verified to August 2026. We did not obtain the 1988 paper, which runs to 53 pages behind a subscription; we have its abstract verbatim from four independent sources and none of its experimental results, effect sizes, statistical analysis or field data figures. The description of its eight scenarios and 486 participants comes from a later paper describing it. Its three-category framework reaches us through a peer-reviewed review attributing that framework to it, not from the paper itself. The field evidence on health plans and retirement programs is reported from a single sentence in the abstract, with no sample size, magnitude or method, and we grade it B on that basis alone. We obtained the replication's abstract verbatim from two independent sources and a passage of its discussion, and not its results, so we cannot report how large the surviving effects were or by how much magnitude varied across scenarios. We did not obtain the thirteen countermeasures identified by the review, which sit precisely where a practitioner would want help. We did not obtain the decision avoidance review, the switching-cost primary sources, or any of the information systems studies, and report all from citing descriptions. Our reading of the failed wagon-colour scenario is our own inference, is not claimed by the replication's authors, and we set out two counter-considerations against it in the body. All arithmetic is ours and uses invented figures throughout, including an eight percent discount rate and a four percent annual saving that is not a forecast and appears in no source. And we note that one of the three explanations depends on loss aversion, whose magnitude the fortieth article in this series withdrew a claim about after a published dispute; that uncertainty propagates into the cognitive misperception account reported here.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is status quo bias?
Is staying put always a bias?
Has it replicated?
Which scenario failed, and does that matter?
How do I tell bias from correct inaction?
What does this mean for client retention?
Does the loss aversion dispute affect this?
References
- Samuelson, W., & Zeckhauser, R. (1988). Status quo bias in decision making. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1(1), 7–59, DOI 10.1007/BF00055564. Publisher record reproducing the abstract in full: on most real decisions, unlike those of economics texts, having a status quo alternative, that is, doing nothing or maintaining one's current or previous decision; on a series of decision-making experiments showing that individuals disproportionately stick with the status quo; on data on the selections of health plans and retirement programs by faculty members revealing that the status quo bias is substantial in important real decisions; on economics, psychology and decision theory providing possible explanations for this bias; and on applications being discussed ranging from marketing techniques, to industrial organization, to the advance of science. Note: the publisher's record; access to the article requires purchase or institutional subscription. We obtained the abstract only, and report none of the paper's experimental results, effect sizes, statistical analysis or field data figures. link.springer.com
- Godefroid and colleagues, How to measure the status quo bias? A review of current literature, Management Review Quarterly, publisher record reproducing the abstract and introductory passages: on the Status Quo Bias describing an individual's preference to avoid changes and maintain the current situation; on technological advances requiring nearly constant change within organizations, so that SQB can become an issue when it hinders progress; on it being crucial to understand how the effect can be reliably measured and, even more importantly, what countermeasures to employ; on prior research having focused more on individual measuring approaches and less on countermeasures; on the authors conducting a literature review spanning different scholarly fields and identifying four measurement approaches and 13 countermeasures along the three aspects of cognitive misperception, rational decision making and psychological commitment; on Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988) having conceptualised those three categories of explanation approaches; on those authors primarily referring, within the first category, to the concept of loss aversion established by Kahneman and Tversky (1979), who showed that losses loom larger than gains and that individuals tend to forego substantial gains out of fear of minor losses; and on loss aversion being only one of three explanation approaches for SQB, such that in certain situations the other two aspects might have more explanation potential. Note: a publisher record for a peer-reviewed review. Our source for the three-category framework, which we did not obtain from the 1988 paper itself. We did not obtain the thirteen countermeasures. link.springer.com
- Xiao, Q., and colleagues, Revisiting status quo bias: Replication of Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988), Meta-Psychology. Journal record reproducing the abstract in full: on status quo bias referring to people's general preference to stick to, or continue with, a previously chosen option; on two pre-registered experiments with U.S. participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, with sample sizes of 311 and 316, attempting to replicate four decision scenarios, being Questions 1, 2, 4 and 6, from the seminal 1988 article that provided the first experimental demonstration of the status quo bias; on the authors having found strong empirical support for the status quo bias in three decision scenarios out of the four, including budget allocation, investment portfolios and college jobs; on the authors having failed to find substantial support for the status quo bias in the wagon colour choice scenario; and on the authors discussing the implications of their results and possible explanations using multiple accounts put forward in the status quo bias literature. Note: the journal's record, reproducing the abstract in full. We did not obtain the paper's results and cannot report the magnitude of the surviving effects. open.lnu.se
- Bibliographic service record for Samuelson, William, and Zeckhauser, Richard J., Status quo bias in decision making, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1988, volume 1, pages 7–59, reproducing the abstract identically. Note: a second independent reproduction of the abstract, used to confirm the journal, volume, pages and year. semanticscholar.org
- The second author's own institutional publication listing, recording William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser, 1988, Status Quo Bias in Decision Making, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, volume 1, issue 1. Note: the author's own institutional page; a third independent confirmation of the citation details. rzeckhauser.scholars.harvard.edu
- Repository copy of the replication paper carrying its discussion and front matter: on the authors' results having been mostly consistent with the original findings, with support for the status quo bias in three scenarios but weak-to-no support in the remaining one, and results suggesting that the magnitude of the bias varied depending on the decision-making scenario, our source truncating; on the author affiliations at the Department of Psychology, University of Hong Kong, and the recorded author contributions, including that one author supervised each step of the project, conducted the pre-registrations and collected the data; on one major reason people resist changes in real life being the cost associated with transitions, which may be trivial in deciding which dishes to order but overwhelming in other cases; on occasions where decision makers have a high degree of uncertainty, where maintaining the status quo is a safe and hence rational choice; on a survey of around 1,500 consumers in the U.S. reported by Hartman and colleagues (1991); and on a review relating findings across disciplines and uncovering four decision avoidance effects, being choice deferral, status quo bias, omission bias and inaction inertia, related by common antecedents and consequences in a rational-emotional model whose prominent components include cost-benefit calculations, anticipated regret and selection difficulty. Note: a repository copy. We obtained the discussion passages and front matter and not the results; the decision avoidance review and the consumer survey are reported from this paper's descriptions of them. researchgate.net
- Academic preprint, Status Quo Bias in Users Information Systems Adoption and Continuance Intentions: A Literature Review and Framework, on status quo bias theory aiming to explain people's preference for maintaining their current status or situation; on the 1988 study explaining why the status quo bias perspective results in individuals disproportionately making decisions to continue an incumbent course of action rather than switching to a new and potentially superior one; on status quo bias stemming partly from a mental illusion and partly from psychological inclination; on a decision maker going through a rational decision-making process before switching, in which the difference between relative costs and benefits of change is considered; on transition costs being incurred during adaptation to the new situation and enhancing SQB if switching costs exceed the efficiency gain associated with a new alternative; and on uncertainty costs representing the psychological uncertainty or perception of risk associated with switching, with an individual's lack of information and expertise about alternatives imposing search and analysis costs. Note: an academic preprint's literature review of the information systems field, not a primary source. We obtained none of the studies it summarises. arxiv.org
- Academic preprint literature section describing the original experiments: on Samuelson and Zeckhauser having performed controlled experiments using a questionnaire containing a series of eight choice problems which they called decision scenarios; on participants having been students enrolled in economics classes at Boston University School of Management and at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University; on a total of 486 students having taken part; on the results showing pronounced status-quo bias; and on a recent experiment by Xiao and colleagues having replicated four decision scenarios and found strong empirical support in three, including budget allocation, investment portfolios and college jobs. Note: an academic preprint's description of the original study, which we did not obtain. The participant count and scenario count reach this article at one remove. arxiv.org
- Annotated bibliography entry for the 1988 paper on a technology adoption research site, defining the status quo bias effect size as the shift in preference when one alternative is labelled as the current state relative to a neutral baseline choice, measured through decision experiments comparing choice distributions with and without a status-quo label; describing psychological commitment sources as drives to reduce cognitive dissonance or maintain self-consistency with past choices; recording that Samuelson and Zeckhauser report effect sizes from both hypothetical-choice experiments and real-world decisions; and noting that in the information systems domain, Kim and Kankanhalli (2009) and subsequent authors operationalise switching-related status quo bias constructs via multi-item Likert scales covering transition costs, sunk costs, regret avoidance, inertia and uncertainty costs. Note: an annotated bibliography on a research site, not a peer-reviewed source. Used for the experimental design principle and the list of operationalised constructs; we obtained none of the studies it references. technologyadoptionbarriers.org
- Academic preprint describing status quo bias as a disproportionate preference for the current state of affairs over other alternatives that may be available, citing Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988); and recording that the status quo often serves as a reference point against which other alternatives are evaluated, citing Masatlioglu and Ok (2005). Note: an academic preprint, not a primary source. We did not obtain the 2005 work on reference points. arxiv.org
- Academic preprint describing an experimental adaptation of the original scenarios, recording a three-condition design comprising a neutral condition where neither option is framed as the status quo and two conditions where each option in turn is presented as the status quo; and recording that budget allocation, investment portfolios and college job selection were chosen because they demonstrated a consistent status quo bias in the original experiments as well as in a recent replication by Xiao and colleagues, and that the change in modality from pen and paper to a web-based survey tool did not affect the replication. Note: an academic preprint, cited for its account of the design and of the replication's medium; we did not obtain the replication's own methods section. arxiv.org
This article discusses research on decision making and is not procurement, contracting, pricing or investment advice. The 1988 paper was not obtained; its abstract was verified across four independent sources and none of its results, effect sizes or field data figures are reported. Its three-category framework reaches this article through a peer-reviewed review attributing that framework to it. The replication's abstract was obtained but not its results. All arithmetic is the authors' own and uses invented figures throughout, including a discount rate and an annual saving that is not a forecast. The reading of the failed wagon-colour scenario is the authors' own inference and is not claimed by the replication's authors.