The Role of Attention in Status Quo Bias: An Interactive Activation Account

Abstract

In numerous decision anomalies, individuals choose to persist with their current choice, even when it may hinder favorable or optimal outcomes.Status quo bias refers to the tendency for favoring the retention of a previous or existing choice, commonly called the status quo.The irrational preference for the status quo appropriates it as a bias, negating the notion of valuebased decision making driven solely by value maximization.While cognitive and affective drivers have successfully explained many instances of status quo bias, there remain cases where this irrational preference persists in the absence of such drivers.An attentional hypothesis proposed that attention, via visual salience, serves as an additional driver of status quo bias in value-based decision making (Miceli & Suri, 2022).In reference to the fundamental "what" and "how" questions regarding decision making, we test the attentional hypothesis using an interactive activation framework (Suri et al., 2020) derived from the IAC model (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981), following principles in the PDP tradition (Rumelhart et al., 1986).We simulate prior empirical findings to address, at an algorithmic level, how attention influences status quo bias during the decision-making process.This paper provides a mechanistic understanding of the role of attention, via visual salience, in value-based decision making.We draw attention to the notion that the superior relative visual salience of the status quo biases attention and drives its selection.It appeals to the consideration of future work exploring more direct measures of attention on status quo bias in decision making to confirm this hypothesis.v

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