The Status Quo Trap

The other day I stumbled across an article about the top mental traps that affect our ability to think rationally. One of the top thinking traps listed was referred to as the “Status Quo Trap.” In experiments, researchers have found that people generally repeat established behaviors; the current status quo has an advantage over every alternative. In other words, people would rather do things the way they have been done before than try something new that could work even better or be more efficient. The continuation of the status quo can be observed in just about every institution, and it happens for a reason: people feel safer when they follow others’ examples, but inventions and ideas come from those few who dare to try something different. The greater the influence of the status quo, the less possibility there is for change and improvement.

Leave the status quo behind!

In an article discussing their research on the status quo bias in decision making, psychologists Samuelson and Zeckhauser discuss how transition costs keep people following nonproductive conventions: “At the societal level, many nonproductive conventions endure mainly because any change would becostly. Thus, hundreds of languages persist worldwide despite the advantages inprinciple of a universal language such as Esperanto. More efficient alternatives seem to have little chance of replacing the classic typewriter keyboard.14 In the United States, nonmetric measurement persists despite metric’s clear advantage.More generally, many American institutions, such as the structure of public education and the four-year presidency, owe their existence largely to historical tradition and seem impervious to wholesale review or change.” It’s a shame because so few people are even aware that this repetition is not entirely rational. In fact, the whole goal of political conservatives is to preserve the status quo, therefore preventing any possible improvement.

They list only a few examples of such nonproductive conventions, but the list could surely go on and on. With the billions of people living on this planet, there is surely enough intelligence and creativity to make the world a place where anyone and everyone can be happy, if only people could see past the status quo.