When 1+1=3 (Part 19 of Cognitive Biases)

Our 19th installment of Cognitive Biases covers the status quo bias, stereotyping, and the subadditivity effect.


Status Quo Bias

Sigmund Freud suggested that there were only two reasons people changed: pain and pressure. Evidence for the status quo bias, a preference not to change established behavior (even if negative) unless the incentive to change is overwhelming, comes from many fields, including political science and economics.

Another way to look at the status quo bias is inertia: the tendency of objects at rest to remain at rest until acted upon by an outside force. The corollary, that objects once in motion tend to stay in motion until acted upon by an outside force, gives hope for change. Unfortunately, one of those outside forces is friction, which is as easy to see in human affairs as it is in the rest of the material universe.

Daniel Kahneman (this time without Amos Tversky) has created experiments that can produce status quo bias effects reliably. It seems to be a combination of loss aversion and the endowment effect, both described elsewhere.

The status quo bias should be distinguished from a rational preference for the status quo in any particular incident. Change is not in itself always good.

Stereotyping

A stereotype, strictly speaking, is a commonly held popular belief about a specific social group or type of individual. It’s not identical to prejudice:

• Prejudices are abstract-general preconceptions or abstract-general attitudes towards any type of situation, object, or person.
• Stereotypes are generalizations of existing characteristics that reduce complexity.

The word stereotype originally comes from printing: a duplicate impression of an original typographic element used for printing instead of the original. (A cliché, interestingly, is the technical term for the printing surface of a stereotype.) It was journalist Walter Lippmann who first used the word in its modern interpersonal sense. A stereotype is a “picture in our heads,“ he wrote, “whether right or wrong.“

Mental categorizing and labeling is both necessary and inescapable. Automatic stereotyping is natural; the necessary (but often omitted) follow-up is to make a conscious check to adjust the impression.

A number of theories have been derived from sociological studies of stereotyping and prejudicial thinking. In early studies it was believed that stereotypes were only used by rigid, repressed, and authoritarian people. Sociologists concluded that this was a result of conflict, poor parenting, and inadequate mental and emotional development. This idea has been overturned; more recent studies have concluded that stereotypes are commonplace.

One theory as to why people stereotype is that it is too difficult to take in all of the complexities of other people as individuals. Even though stereotyping is inexact, it is an efficient way to mentally organize large blocks of information. Categorization is an essential human capability because it enables us to simplify, predict, and organize our world. Once one has sorted and organized everyone into tidy categories, there is a human tendency to avoid processing new or unexpected information about each individual. Assigning general group characteristics to members of that group saves time and satisfies the need to predict the social world in a general sense.

Another theory is that people stereotype because of the need to feel good about oneself. Stereotypes protect one from anxiety and enhance self-esteem. By designating one's own group as the standard or normal group and assigning others to groups considered inferior or abnormal, it provides one with a sense of worth, and in that sense, stereotyping is related to the ingroup bias.

Subadditivity Effect

The subadditivity effect is the tendency to judge probability of the whole to be less than the probabilities of the parts.

For instance, subjects in one experiment judged the probability of death from cancer in the United States was 18%, the probability from heart attack was 22%, and the probability of death from "other natural causes" was 33%. Other participants judged the probability of death from a natural cause was 58%. Natural causes are made up of precisely cancer, heart attack, and "other natural causes," however, the sum of the latter three probabilities is 73%. According to Tversky and Koehler in a 1994 study, this kind of result is observed consistently.

The subadditivity effect is related to other math-oriented cognitive biases, including the denomination effect, the base rate fallacy, and especially the conjunction fallacy.

More next week.

To read the whole series, click "Cognitive bias" in the tag cloud to your right, or search for any individual bias the same way.