Vijay Kumar Gaba

 In a paper published in 1988 researchers William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser highlighted that a large majority of people have a cognitive bias against change in their present conditions. In their research, they found that “people show a disproportionate preference for choices that maintain the status quo.” They referred to this trait of human behavior as “status quo bias”. Several other researchers have added subsequently to the findings of Samuelson and Zeckhauser.

In my personal life, I have noticed several instances of status quo bias whether it is ordering in a restaurant, making investment decisions, buying vehicles, choosing healthcare professionals, or even voting in the elections.

I find that status quo bias is particularly strong during periods of stress or crisis. I have observed that during periods of stress or crisis (actual or perceived) people generally avoid trying new things, people, or places, etc. They prefer to trust their existing captain when the waters become rough, rather than preferring a change of guards.

The politicians world over perhaps recognized this cognitive bias of people a long time ago and internalized this in their election strategy books. In this age of social media, where information (especially falsehood) spreads faster than sunlight, they often manufacture crises to distract people from real issues and nudge them to maintain status quo, i.e., keep the extant establishments in power.

The reaction of many heads of government, e.g., the US, the UK, France, India etc., to the latest attacks of the Palestinian Hamas Militia on Israeli territories and people indicates their eagerness to shift the popular narrative away from the domestic problems to a distant localized geopolitical event, which may or may not have material implications for their domestic constituencies. To the naked eye, it appears that they are manufacturing a crisis that does not exist just to distract the attention of their domestic constituency and invoke their cognitive status quo bias.

The US economy is struggling to manage the mountains of debt it has accumulated in the past three years; elevated inflation that is hurting the household budgets badly; rising homelessness; rising crimes and drug abuse; crashing ratings of the incumbent President; an apparently clueless central bank; rising discontentment over its policy to fund Ukraine’s war efforts; and diminishing clout over global policy-making (especially in light of the total failure of economic sanctions on Russia and dismal impact of its tariff war with China), pensioners and savers staring at huge losses on their bond portfolios; and financial system placed precariously as MTM losses on their treasury holding climb (eroding their reserves), household delinquencies rising and corporate bankruptcies also rising ominously.

The situation in the UK and France is no different. It may actually be worse than the US, as any visitor to the cities of London and Paris would tell you about the collapse of civic infrastructure, and the rise in homelessness, petty crime, and racial slurs.

Back home, I find that “Hamas” and “Israel” are trending in all social media ahead of the Cricket ODI World Cup. This explains the kind of frenzy created to distract people from core issues that affect their day-to-day lives. Our government seems to have changed our long held Middle East policy of equidistance from both Israel and Palestine, without any discussion or offering any explanation, totally disregarding the fact that it could have serious implications for our energy security and internal security.