Why is Changing Behavior So Hard?

1) I had recently gotten a promotion of six months of Netflix with our cable provider here in Israel.  As I became more and more hooked on Netflix, I began to worry about the inevitable moment my Netflix would be cut off.  And then one day, while checking my credit card, I realized I had been charged.  “Oh!” I realized, “It must have been one of those ‘if-you-don’t-cancel-we’ll-just-assume-you’ll-continue’ things.”  And guess what? I still haven’t cancelled.  Doing something to change a status quo is hard.  Here, the company intelligently created the default that I’d have to opt out.  And guess what? I haven’t bothered to exert the effort to cancel.

2) I recently discovered a very good new cell phone deal with a new company.  The third, fourth, and fifth lines were free with unlimited data for the next year.  No commitment.  No change of phone number.  I was sold, and I tried to talk my in-laws into joining me.  There were simply no downsides.  They, however, had been with their old company for years.  They said “we’ll think about it” (i.e., “no”).  Here, they were continuing with the status quo, despite the clear irrationality of it.

Both of these examples, although different, remind us that we humans, are not always making logical, rational decisions.  Psychologists call this tendency to stick with what we have the Default Bias or Status Quo Bias, and sure enough, research has shown my in-laws are not the only ones who will stick with a given mobile company out of habit (Khedhaoria, Thurik, Gurau, & Van Hecket al., 2016)

A powerful illustration of this bias to avoid change was published in Science (Johnson & Goldstein, 2003).  The authors compared organ donation data by country, and found that, in countries where organ donation is the default (that is, people have to opt out of donating rather than opt in), a greater proportion of the population are organ donors.  Consider, for example, Austria and Germany–two countries that are geographically and culturally similar.  At the time of their publication, Germany had an organ donation rate of 12% compared to Austria’s rate of  99.98%.  The difference?  In Germany, you had to opt in, whereas in Austria, the default was organ donation.  In other words, similar to my Netflix promotion, you had to “contact them to cancel”.

The power of the default has been used to nudge humanity towards more environmentally-conscious choices.  For example, in 2008, Rutgers University changed their printer settings to have “print on both sides” as the default, and guess what?  44% paper reduction! (https://oit-nb.rutgers.edu/service/printing)

In one lab study, subjects were told to pretend they were undergoing a remodeling of their home and the contractor had outfitted their house with lighting. All subjects were given information about the costs and benefits of this choice, and then asked if they wanted to switch, at no cost to the alternative.  When the default outfitting was energy-efficient lightbulbs, the energy-efficient bulbs were chosen twice as often (Dinner, Johnson, Goldstein, & Liu, 2011).

Keeping with the theme of saving the environment, conference participants were given the option to add an additional cost to their plane travel with a donation to offset the carbon cost (e.g., planting trees or investing in alternative energies).  When acceptance of the policy was presented as an opt-out alternative (the extra fee was already included and participants had to tick off that they would like to opt out), more people accepted the extra cost as opposed to when you had to explicitly tick a box.  After all, it’s somehow psychologically more palatable to accept a fee that’s already on your bill than to charge yourself extra, even though mathematically it is the same cost (Araña & León, 2013)

Defaults have been shown to influence nutritional choices.  A recent study (van Kleef et al, 2018) highlighted how when whole wheat bread (as opposed to white bread) was set as a default at a sandwich stand, 94% stuck with this default option (as opposed to 80% sticking to the default when the white bread was the default).  Likewise, people usually will stick with whatever milk (e.g., 2%, whole, skim) is the default milk at their coffee shop (Colby, Li, & Chapman, 2014).

Let’s look at an example to figure out why this might be.

Imagine you are checking out of a pet store, and the cashier says “We automatically include a $1 donation to help homeless animals.  You can opt out if you’d like”. You find yourself saying “fine”.  The morality of helping animals aside, would you have been as likely to add $1 to your bill if she had framed it as “do you want to add a $1 donation to help homeless animals?”

Why does the former frame work better?

First, we are a bit lazy.  “Should I give the $1? Should I not? I don’t want to think about this!”  If I don’t want to think, I just go along with what someone else decided for me.  Less effort.  And if I have to make a call to cancel?  Or fill out a form, or even worse, stand in line and then fill out a form to opt out?  Definitely easier to just stick with the default.

Second, a default seems like the recommended choice.  If I order from a McDonalds screen and the default is the small french fries, I assume that they are suggesting that is the appropriate portion for one person.  Here that $1 donation is the default—we assume it’s the norm.

Third, defaults often represent the status quo, and change usually involves a trade-off.  Consider a new job.  There will be the cost of moving, the emotional toll of leaving coworkers and the discomfort of a new place.  We worry about what losses we may incur if we change the status quo.  This loss aversion prevents us from wanting to take the “risk” of change.  No, there isn’t much trade-off to giving $1 in this case to homeless animals, but the point is our brain might be wired to be conservative.

There are real consequences to humanity not learning how to overcome our tendency to stick with the status quo.  This is exemplified in the following case (Montpetit, & Lachapelle, 2017):

Soil contamination is a serious global environmental problem.  There are estimated to be over a million sites in the U.S. and Europe alone where soil is contaminated, leading to chemicals which can get into the food supply and threaten the health of populations.  A low-cost alternative to conventional (and more expensive) removal methods has emerged in the last 20 years.  Pytoremediation is the use of living green plans for in situ removal, degredation, and containment of contaminants in soil and water.  It is a low-cost way to improve the economies of developing countries, and the plants can even be beautiful flowers that can be sold.  Why would anyone be against this?  Montepit and Lachapelle conclude that the Status Quo Bias is the barrier to accepting this new innovation.