The human bias for 'status quo'

Looking at the many candidates now for national and local positions like the many brands of products on a shelf, all claiming to make your life easier, healthier, brighter, how would you really make your choice? Of course, it is not really fair and accurate to equate politicians with commercial products. After all, commercial goods lead a far more honorable shelf life in that when they are no longer wanted by their consumers, they naturally make an exit. They do not cling in desperation just because they have nowhere else to go or are just too intellectually challenged to think of retirement options.

But I could not help it. This is what ran through my mind as I read a journal study on what happens to the brain when you are facing a difficult decision and you had a choice between not doing anything and changing things. Apparently, humans are known to have a “status quo” bias which means that when we encounter difficult choices, we would rather do nothing than change things, EVEN IF doing nothing is not really the best decision we could make. The study does not just affirm this tendency of humans to stick with the status quo when choices become difficult but gives us a picture of what happens to our brain when this happens and even more, what happens to it as we actually choose to change things.

The study was published online last April 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) and entitled “Overcoming status quo bias in the human brain” by Stephen M. Fleming, Charlotte L. Thomas, and Raymond J. Dolan. They looked at brains at work through functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), a machine that looks at blood flow in the brain, showing which parts are activated relative to others, while doing a particular task. For this study, it was deciding whether a tennis ball is in or out. Since it is difficult (but certainly funny) to attach a neuro-imaging machine to people watching tennis, the tennis scene was shown on a computer instead while the subjects were hooked to an fMRI. They made their subjects decide on whether a ball is “in” or “out” in a tennis match, in increasing difficulty, with “in” being the default choice since that would just require “silence” (inaction) on their part and “out” would require that they voice it out.

They saw that in order to overcome a tendency to just leave things as they are, parts of the brain called the subthalamic nucleus and the inferior frontal cortex seem to consult with each other to give some kind of nudge to your brain to action. The researchers do not yet understand why this happens. For now, the evidence simply suggests that the brain needs a conspired action from these parts in order to rouse it from its “as is” status. They said that from other studies, we choose not to do anything to change the current situation mainly because one, there is money involved, two, the fear of losing what we have now (whether little or a lot) and last, the possibility that we will regret our action if we changed things.

The researchers reminded readers of the limitations of the study in that it only shows what happens to the brain when it faces difficulty in decision-making. But I think “difficulty” could mean and take many forms so that this study could probably, extend to many kinds of decision-making, and not just to shopping or choosing investments, as they mentioned in the study. And if “difficulty” could include standing in a booth, with one pen, having to choose among a litany of names, some familiar, some alien, but all claiming to care about you and the future of over 90 million Filipinos whose brains have been fried for the past few months in the slick oil of election campaigns, wouldn’t voting these coming elections qualify as “difficult”?

The natural human tendency is to NOT change things and this is not necessarily a good thing. In fact, the study showed that not doing anything often leads to more mistakes. Some of you vanguards of that “status quo” may say that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Hmm, unless you have been in a deep coma for the past decades, you know something in our national life is seriously “broke” and guess what, it ain’t your back.

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