Biases and effectsSamuelson and Zeckhauser, 1988
Whatever you have now looks better than any alternative. Why you know the other plan is cheaper and still do not switch.
The set-up: "You have inherited a lump sum from an uncle. How do you invest it?" Options: safe bonds, a moderate stock, a risky stock, and so on.
One group simply chooses. The other is first told "it is currently invested in the moderate stock" and then chooses.
Whichever option was labelled the current one got picked more. Same four choices. The only difference was which one was called the status quo.
Related but distinct. The default effect is about what happens if you do nothing. Status quo bias is about choosing the current state even when you are actively re-choosing.
Two roots. Loss aversion — the pain of a change that goes wrong outweighs the pleasure of one that goes right. And asymmetric regret — change and fail and you "meddled"; stay and fail and it "could not be helped".
So even when the numbers say switch, you do not. It was never a numbers problem; it is a problem of how pain is estimated.
Re-ask: "if I had nothing right now and were choosing from scratch, which would I pick?" Same move as the endowment fix — demote the status quo to one option among several.
Treat not-changing as a decision. Saying "I am keeping the same plan this year" out loud turns inertia into a judgment, and judgments can be revisited next year.
Where switching is a hassle, price the hassle. "Am I paying 10,000 yen a year to avoid thirty minutes of forms?" Most people move once they have counted.
The phone plan
You know there is a cheaper plan and stay on the same one for years. Thirty minutes of forms plus "what if switching goes wrong" outweighs tens of thousands of yen a year, in the feeling if not on paper.
The usual place, the usual seat
A new restaurant that disappoints hurts more than the usual one being fine feels good. It is not the miss you fear; it is the thought "I should not have bothered".
The meeting that ends in "let us keep it as is for now"
A proposal to change must be justified; the proposal to keep things never is. Require a reason for "leave it as is" too, and the two finally compete on equal terms.
If you take one thing
Not changing is also a choice. The moment you see it that way, it stops being inertia and becomes a decision.
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