The status quo bias and political conservatism: a little psychology

Here in my little psychology department in my little blue island in our very red state, we've been interviewing candidates for a position in social psychology.  I love social psych, especially social cognition, because it's so applicable to what's going on in the world today.

Well, one of the candidates gave a teaching demonstration (we are a teaching college), and the topic was reasoning biases (which I love), and she specifically focused on what's called the status quo bias, a tendency to prefer stability to change.  I immediately was reminded of Republicans, especially the ordinary folks who consistently vote for the appearance of stability rather than progressive change -- even if that change would benefit them.

Follow me over to the dark side for a brief lesson and some comments... (And an explanation for the poll.)

The status quo bias was originally formulated by Dan Kahneman some years ago.

The short story is that people are biased to prefer no change to change -- unless there are powerful forces that require change.  In decision-making research it has long been known that decision makers are risk aversive (we're willing to gamble when the gains are made salient, but are reluctant when the losses are salient -- this is basic Feldman framing stuff).  Change often represents a risk.

The bias shows up in a ton of areas of policy and decision-making, from large issues that affect all of us, to mundane decisions we make every day.  One of the explanations for many of our biases (including this one) is that we tend to shut down or curtail thought: we don't think things through.  We get stuck thinking about the easy stuff, the very salient, the central things, and do not follow through and consider more peripheral factors.  And as they say, the devil is in the details; it behooves us to think things through.

So: The status quo bias got me to thinking: Could this be part of the reason we re-elected GW Bush?  He was sucking in the polls.  People were dissatisfied with the way things were going.  The economic prospects of most Americans were bleak.  But we put the loser/slacker right back into the White House.

What's worse, if you read Thomas Frank, is that you have a huge group of people out there who are apparently voting against their own economic (and often social) self-interest -- and there's hardly any reason to think that the bulk of them (in spite of the wins in November, things were still pretty close in many wins, and we lost in many others) are going to suddenly start to vote for liberal Democratic candidates.  Conservatism regnant.

So in thinking about thinking (hee), I found interesting the research on the status quo bias and the result that when people are threatened, they're more likely to engage in it.  When we're threatened we want the familiar, the usual, the customary.  When we fear, we also fear change.  Threats make us conservative (unwilling to risk change) by inhibiting critical thinking:  We shut down our higher cognitive processes and focus on the easy, the central.

Well!  One way that is often used to provide a threat in lab research is called "mortality salience" -- this means pretty much what it says: your own mortality is made salient to you.  This produces reliable effects in a number of areas of decision-making, accentuating other biases as well (self-serving biases, especially -- those are the ones we use to maintain our sense that we are basically okay people).

The usual mortality-salience manipulation is to have participants sit for ten minutes or so and write in the most detail they can about what they think will happen to their body as they die, and then what will happen to it afterwards.  Sort of brings home the idea of death, making it very graphic, and very very personal.  

So here's a political strategy: make people afraid of their own deaths (9/11! 9/11!), provide them with simple-to-understand platitudes in the knowledge they won't think them through, perhaps provide them with the illusion that someone out there will take care of them and ease those fears of death, and get your name on a ballot.  

Zut! Puf! Alors! you get Republicans in office.

I do sometimes wonder if the Republicans are smart enough to realize what they're doing, or if they're just fucking lucky.  Ergo, the poll!

The question that comes up, though, when I think of this is what we can do to stop it.  One thing we can do is to put 9/11 and other external "threats" in perspective.  There is no existential threat for the vast bulk of the American people.  There is no threat to our civilization -- except for ourselves.  I wrote a little diary on the scaremongers a while ago.  I think it is part of our jobs to try to illustrate to people that we have far more to fear from, well, our fear than we do from any outside influence.  We've watched this republican administration dismantle our country because of fear.  That's what we need to address.

Do not be afraid!  We are smart, we are hard-working, we are capable.  Let's get people to focus on the positive.  Let's get people to focus on what we can do when we put our minds to it.