{"id":3040,"date":"2017-04-17T21:26:51","date_gmt":"2017-04-18T01:26:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/?p=3040"},"modified":"2020-02-07T11:52:21","modified_gmt":"2020-02-07T16:52:21","slug":"what-do-high-school-musical-and-the-2016-election-have-in-common-status-quo-bias","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/2017\/04\/17\/what-do-high-school-musical-and-the-2016-election-have-in-common-status-quo-bias\/","title":{"rendered":"What Do High School Musical and the 2016 Election Have in Common? Status Quo Bias."},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2006, the cast of High School Musical<\/em> sang and danced wildly in a school cafeteria, preaching the benefits of \u201csticking to the status quo.\u201d All the students in the school, jocks, academics, musicians, protested the changing school-climate, one becoming increasingly accepting and diverse. In the context of the movie, this song serves to characterize high schools across the nation as afraid of change and difference. To the audience\u2019s later astonishment, the students are able to overcome this bias against change, celebrating the ultimate destruction of the rigid high school social borders! This heroic defeat of the high school caste system is certainly enjoyable for a generation of millennials, despite the 56% rotten tomatoes rating. Yet, in reality, change concerning social systems is far more difficult to ac<\/span>hieve. In fact, the fear of change itself has its roots in cognitive and social psychology with what is called the status quo bias.<\/span><\/p>\n

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www.fanpop.com<\/p><\/div>\n

Simply put, the status quo bias is known as people\u2019s general preference for the existing and enduring states of the world and one\u2019s own self (Eidelman & Crandall, 2012). Most people would sooner their life stay static than to welcome a new change, big or small. This phenomenon is what often prevents people from people making life changes, such as moving to a new home, trying a new diet, or even changing their preferred route home from work. Because stasis provides feelings of comfort and security<\/a>, most people tend to avoid the threats of a new change or lifestyle. In High School Musical<\/em>, super basketball stud Troy Bolton fears that his newfound interest in musical theatre will threaten the social safety in his athletic passions. Similarly, Gabriella is scared that the spotlight of a career in theatre will bring unwanted attention to her quiet, scholarly ways. Both protagonists show a preference for their current social group out of worry that they might be thought less of by other students if they joined another one- a prime example of sticking to the status quo!<\/p>\n

The ever-relevant Troy and Gabriella both fear they have something to lose by going against the status quo, a principle psychologists call loss aversion. This is essentially the idea that the losses of a potential outcome will weigh far more than the gains in terms of decision making (Li, Liu & Liu, 2016). People tend to ruminate more on the negative effects<\/a> of a risky decision or memory, making it difficult to view the positive effects as attainable. This phenomenon is especially likely if the decision-maker in question has a range of negative memories that make an unhappy outcome see more probable. Because they believe that the negative effects are more likely, they therefore go to great lengths to avoid them by sticking to the status quo. Say, for example, that you are considering going on a difficult hike by yourself. You know this is a risky decision for a wide-variety of reasons, but you also have a friend who was really injured hiking this trail alone. Because of the availability\u00a0of this one memory, you decide not to go on the hike- you don\u2019t want to get hurt like them! The influence of your memories and the basic idea that, without proper training, people should not hike alone, work together to get people to stick to the status quo.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Yet, some other psychologists believe that people tend to show the status quo bias as a result of the cost of change. While this is related to loss aversion, this theory places higher emphasis on the fact that change in itself is taxing. Decision-making is a cognitive process that can consume a great deal of mental energy and so people tend to prefer inaction over action (Ritov & Baron, 1990). This means that, overall, people tend to not bother going through the process described above, weighing positives and negatives in order to make an informed decision about the future. Since they do not go through this process, things simply remain the same. In the context of High School Musical<\/em>, it would be far easier for In other words, a lack of action and a bias against taxing mental processes facilitates the status quo.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So, we know the status quo bias is relevant to High School Musical<\/em> and personal decisions, but this cognitive bias has greater implications for the world we live in today. If we think back to the presidential election of 2016 (the one that had everyone on edge for a wide variety of reasons), we can see the effects of the status quo bias operating on a large-scale. Conservatism, the political ideology that prevailed with the election of Donald Trump, has its root in the status quo bias (Eidelman & Crandall, 2012). The conservative ideology is rooted in preserving the traditional values, institutions, and practices of America. A fear that the state of our nation was departing too far from the idealized America of the past was at the very center of Trump\u2019s campaign, as evidenced by his campaign slogan: Make America Great Again! Many American citizens voted for Trump under the impression that he would repeal some of the changes previous progressive administrations had been working towards. Clearly, to some degree the status quo bias is at work here as America showed a preference for the past over the present. <\/span><\/p>\n

This same phenomenon occurred in the democratic primary elections, as democrats clearly favored Hilary Clinton, who has been a representative of the Democratic party for a long time, over Bernie Sanders, a far more progressive candidate. Clinton\u2019s ability to grab 3.6 million more votes than Sanders showed that, even the liberal faction of America has a resistance to change. Moving forward, we might have to look to High School Musical (as scary as that sounds) for inspiration and other more serious examples that change can have positive, significant effects in order to overcome this innate human bias.<\/span><\/p>\n

References<\/p>\n

Eidelman, S., & Crandall, C. S. (2012). Bias in favor of the status quo. Social and personality <\/span><\/p>\n

psychology compass, 6(3), 270-281.<\/span><\/p>\n

Li, J., Liu, M., & Liu, X. (2016). Why do employees resist knowledge management systems? An<\/p>\n

empirical study from the status quo bias and inertia perspectives. Computers in human behavior, <\/span><\/p>\n

65, 189-200.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ritov, I., & Baron, J. (1999). Protected values and omission bias. Organizational Behavior And Human Decision Processes, 79(2), 79-94.<\/p>\n

Images retrieved from<\/p>\n

www.fanpop.com<\/p>\n

www.interactioninstitute.org<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2006, the cast of High School Musical sang and danced wildly in a school cafeteria, preaching the benefits of \u201csticking to the status quo.\u201d All the students in the school, jocks, academics, musicians, protested the changing school-climate, one becoming increasingly accepting and diverse. In the context of the movie, this song serves to characterize […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7489,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[266316,130416],"tags":[130382,885],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3040"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7489"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3040"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3176,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3040\/revisions\/3176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}