Works
- Status Quo Bias in Decision Making, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1988
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
Status quo bias. In a series of decision experiments, people chose an option disproportionately often when it was framed as the status quo, and field data on faculty choices of health plans and retirement programs showed the same pattern. The authors attribute the bias to transition costs, loss aversion, and psychological commitment to past choices, among other causes. Caveat: A preregistered replication (Xiao, Lam, Piara, and Feldman, Meta-Psychology, 2021) found strong support in three of the four original scenarios it retested and little support in the fourth.
What it explains
Samuelson and Zeckhauser explain why the existing arrangement wins ties and many contests it should lose: framing an option as the current state makes it more likely to be kept. Whoever can define what the status quo is gains an advantage before any debate begins.
Tactics that draw on William Samuelson (26)
- Acting on Ambiguity
- Analysis Paralysis
- Appeal to Company History
- Burden of Proof Shift
- Choice Architecture
- Evidence of Local Difference
- Fait Accompli
- Flight-to-Quality Centralization
- Golden Handcuffs
- Gray Zone Expansion
- Leadership Churn Window
- Local Systems Holdout
- Loss Aversion Framing
- Non-Transferable Skill Trap
- Parking Lot
- Perpetual Pilot
- Pocket Veto
- Precedent Farming
- Riding an Outside Shock
- Sovereignty Erosion
- Spaghetti Code Defense
- Staged Pilots Before Scale
- Sudden Vacancy Move
- Temporary Fix Inertia
- Unspoken Rules and Taboos
- Zero-Based Reset