People tend to favor maintaining the status quo to such an extent that it’s a recognized cognitive bias, one of many systematic distortions of thinking we’re prone to. The status-quo bias goes hand-in-hand with the loss-aversion bias, which leads us to pay more attention to what we might lose than to what we might gain. The status quo often feels less risky, whether or not it actually is.
It stands to reason, then, that when faced with making a choice between an option that maintains the status quo (the default option) and an alternative option, we’d be more likely to choose the default option. And we are—but only if we make the choice immediately. If we delay making a choice that we could have made immediately, we’re much more likely to choose the alternative option.
There have been a number of studies over the past 25 years, all of which show the same results. Simply delaying making a decision we could have made immediately decreases the likelihood we’ll choose the default option. It doesn’t matter what the options are or which option, if either, is the better choice. Delay itself casts doubt on the default option.
Failure to Choose
This isn’t hard to understand. If we could have made a choice immediately, then why didn’t we? The know-it-all interpreter—or explainer—inside our head has an answer for this, as it does for just about everything: obviously there’s some doubt as to the appeal of the default option. Otherwise, based on the status quo bias, we would have chosen it immediately.
It also turns out that being in a state of doubt about something that is completely unrelated to the choice at hand can have the same impact on our choice. Doubt, in general, influences us to choose the alternative option rather than the default option.
Delay and doubt are factors we should take into consideration when we’re faced with making a choice between a default option and an alternative option. The conventional wisdom is that taking time to make a choice leads to making better choices. That seems reasonable, but it isn’t entirely accurate. Yes, delay has an effect; it’s just not the effect we may have attributed to it.
If we’re aware that delay tends to make the default option seem less appealing, we can factor that in when choosing when to choose. We can mitigate some of the effect of delaying choice just by knowing the effect is there.
I’m a person who definitely questions conventional wisdom, but I have to admit “taking time to make a choice leads to making better choices” sounds pretty good.
Your presenting delay as a factor to consider is very useful in making choices, rather than just simply questioning or supporting this conventional wisdom.
Yes, it always sounded really good to me, too. But looking at this in terms of cognitive biases (status-quo and loss-aversion) gives it a different spin. I’ve been exploring cognitive biases for a while (too much time on my hands?). It’s surprising how many there are and how much of an effect they have on our thinking.