People prefer technologies that were invented or commercialised before they were born. This “status quo bias” appears to hold true even when people think the technology is older than they are but isn’t actually.
at Southern Methodist University in Texas and his colleague explored the status quo bias through four experiments involving around 2500 adults in the US recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing platform.
The first experiment tested how people perceive aerogel, a solid foam consisting of more than 99 per cent air that is one of the lightest known materials. The researchers presented different invention dates for aerogel and asked people to rate it on a scale from -3 to +3, where -3 meant they thought it had a very negative impact on society and +3 a very positive one. People who thought it was invented before they were born gave an average score of 1.09 compared with 0.75 for those who thought it was invented later.
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“It shows that this bias can come through with regards to technology purely based on perception,” says co-author at Belmont University in Tennessee.
The second and third experiments also found people favour technologies invented or commercialised prior to their birth. These experiments involved more familiar technologies such as microwaves, cassette players, cell phones, mp3 players, laptops, email, electric cars, drones and Apple iPods.
A fourth experiment found that individual participants with stronger status quo bias – as measured in some preliminary questions – rated newer-seeming tech more negatively than people with weaker biases.
Three of the four experiments also showed how people’s age affects their status quo bias. For example, the fourth experiment found that opinion of a technology dropped an average of 0.21 points for every 10 years older a participant was when the technology was invented. This finding aligns with previous surveys suggesting that early adopters of technology tend to be younger.
Such research doesn’t address why the status quo bias could exist. There may be an evolutionary advantage to avoiding disruptive and potentially negative effects from shaking up the status quo, says , a historian of technology at Virginia Tech. After all, early tech adopters run the risks of adopting things that fail, he says.
Psychological Science
