Status Quo bias

Status-quo bias is the tendency to not change a pre-existing behavior unless the incentive to change is very compelling. This is a cognitive bias because it is one of the heuristics our brain employ to facilitate decision making. Staying with the pre-existing choice saves people time, effort and money because they do not need to look for other information as alternatives hence requires no time and effort.

In order to generalize this cognitive bias to the field of conservation psychology, we will take a look at how status-quo bias affects peoples’ choice of green consumerism- the choice of green electricity. In an interesting study on green defaults, it was found that when green electricity was presented as the default supply, in an observational study in a small town called Schönau, people stick to this default. Hence the authors of the study conducted an experiment to address the limitations of this observation. Two experiments were conducted, the first one looks at choices to change when participants were put into green default or grey default. The second one looks at the monetary value participants placed on electricity supply and how much they are will to accept or pay for the green electricity.

Based on the findings in these two experiments, we can see that people are generally inclined to stay with their current state and reluctant to change. Therefore, this reluctance to change is a barrier to conservation psychology because one aim of conservation psychology is to change human behavior to achieve a sustainable level of the environment.

Experiment 1 Conditions:

Participants were randomly assigned to either conditions, the green default or the grey default, and indicated their choice of the two company.

Experiment 1 Results:

The results indicated that participants were significantly more likely to choose the default company in their respective assigned condition as their supplier.

Experiment 2:

The results suggested that once people have established a default, they place higher monetary value in it and are more reluctant to change.