Universal Principles of Design, Updated and Expanded Third Edition

174 Status Quo Bias

A preference for things as they are, even when a change would improve things.

The status quo bias refers to a preference for avoiding change and maintaining the current situation. The bias is a complex mix of emotional, perceptual, and rational phenomena, including anchoring, inertia, loss aversion, perceived threat, regret avoidance, and sunk costs, to name a few. In sum, this means people like familiar things more than unfamiliar things; they weight what could go wrong with change more heavily than what could go right; they trust things that exist more than things that don’t; they prefer the roads well traveled and the paths of least resistance; they resist change when feeling overwhelmed or presented with too many options; ...