Status quo bias
Status quo bias is the preference for keeping things as they are rather than changing.
Offered a change that is genuinely better, people often stick with what they have anyway. Status quo bias is the gravitational pull of the current state.
Status quo bias is the tendency to prefer keeping things as they are over changing them, even when a change would leave one better off. The current state enjoys an advantage in our decisions out of all proportion to its merits.
Why standing still feels safe
The bias draws on several deeper forces. Loss aversion makes the potential downsides of a change loom larger than its equivalent upsides, so any switch feels riskier than staying. The effort and uncertainty of changing add a further cost. And the current state often serves as the reference point against which alternatives are judged, so moving away from it registers as a loss before any gain is counted. Doing nothing feels like the cautious, blameless option.
Where it shows up
Status quo bias keeps people in default options, unsuitable insurance plans, underperforming investments, and arrangements long past their usefulness, simply because switching requires a decision and an effort. It is why defaults are so powerful: whatever is set as the starting position tends to stick. At the level of organisations and societies, it manifests as inertia, the persistence of policies and practices that no one would choose afresh but that survive because changing them is harder than leaving them.
Working with it and against it
The bias can be harnessed or countered. Designers use it deliberately by setting the default to the option most people are better off with, so inertia works in their favour. To counter it in one's own decisions, the useful exercise is to ask whether, if not already in the current situation, you would actively choose it. If the honest answer is no, the only thing keeping you there is the bias.
Status quo bias explains a great deal of stickiness that looks like preference but is really inertia. The current arrangement is not chosen so much as defaulted into, and distinguishing a genuine preference for what you have from mere reluctance to change is one of the quietly important disciplines of good decision-making.