Escaping the typical

ROUTINE AND NORMALCY arise from any human activity. Knowing what to expect instills a sense of security in what has usually been done before. This comfort—or complacency—brings forth a cognitive bias that psychologists refer to as the status quo bias.

Suppose you are in in a grocery store, walking through an aisle of coffee products, and you are presented with a variety of new brands of coffee. But as you decide which one to buy, you find that your instinct is to grab what you have always been using. On another instance, when an upperclassman advised you to drop a class because of a terror professor, you give them the benefit of the doubt and see how things would go first, rather than readily alter your subject roster for that semester. The common denominator between these two situations is the preservation of the status quo. There is an automatic preference for what has been or what is to continue being.

Several psychological studies found that the status quo bias has an underlying biopsychological explanation. Its occurrence is driven by the activity in the insula, a small region of the cerebral cortex, and the striatum in the limbic system. According to the study of Yu et al. (2010), the increased tendency to choose the atypical was related to decreased activity in the anterior insula. The activation of the anterior insula due to loss after deviating from default choices was also found to be associated with experienced frustration. Meanwhile, following the status quo triggers activity in the ventral area of the striatum, which is also a part of the brain associated with reward regulation. This implies that we tend to avoid atypical options, as they induce more negative emotions upon failure than default choices.

While we are more often predisposed to preserving the status quo, there are tendencies that we reject it. Fleming et al. (2010) found that this act of negation incites a spike in activity in the subthalamic nucleus which is a part of the basal ganglia in the brain associated with action selection. Blood oxygen level-dependent brain signals occurring in it increase as the difficulty of the decisions to be made increase. These findings suggest that status quo rejection is a more conscious and active enterprise than merely going with the flow.

From a behavioral and psychological point of view, Suri et al. in 2013 conducted an experiment to test what could trigger rejection of the status quo. A set of participants about to be electrocuted were given the choice between waiting for the shock to come, or pressing a button that would reduce the waiting time. The results reveal that more people would rather press the button and have the shock come more quickly than simply waiting for it to do so. This shows that a status quo is likelier to be rejected when there is a distinct beneficence in the alternative, and a clearly inferior default.

Whether the scales would favor transformation or stagnation is founded on the summation of our experiences. The longer the time that a routine has been set, the more difficult it becomes to change. It is this longevity factor that adds up to the complacency we feel with the personal and social systems we have in place, tricking us into thinking that everything is still fine. However, when the realization comes that the status quo pales in comparison to a better counterpart, it is then that the decision and effort to reject the status quo may and must be made. ●

Eidelman, S., & Crandall, C. S. (2014). The Intuitive Traditionalist. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 53-104. doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-800284-1.00002-3

Fleming, S. M., Thomas, C. L., & Dolan, R. J. (2010). Overcoming status quo bias in the human brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(13), 6005-6009. doi:10.1073/pnas.0910380107

Henderson, R. (2016). How Powerful Is Status Quo Bias?. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/after-service/201609/how-powerful-is-status-quo-bias

Suri, G., Sheppes, G., Schwartz, C., & Gross, J. J. (2013). Patient Inertia and the Status Quo Bias. Psychological Science, 24(9), 1763-1769. doi:10.1177/0956797613479976

Yu, R., Mobbs, D., Seymour, B., & Calder, A. J. (2010). Insula and striatum mediate the default bias. Journal of Neuroscience, 30(44), 14702-14707.

WRITTEN BY FROILAN CARIAGA GIAN DE GUZMAN

GRAPHICS BY CHRIS AQUINO

Honor Ayroso was a peasant organizer and activist who was abducted by suspected military officers on February 9, 2002 along with Johnny Orcino. He was never seen again. Honor is survived by his wife Dee Ayroso, who created this comic on the anniversary of his disappearance, and his daughter Alab Ayroso, who now serves as Scientia’s Online Editor.

VOL. 25 NO. 3 THE CHANGE ISSUE JAN. 2019

WRITING

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