An Empirical Study Of Status Quo Bias In College Students’ Behavior Decision Making

Status quo bias refers to the behavior tendency that people tend to maintain the current or previous decision-making and state, do nothing to change in decision making. The most common explain is theory of loss aversion and regret theory, self consciousness and cognitive dissonance theory also can explain it in a certain extent.Beginning in the1980s, western psychologists working in the study of the status quo bias, and achieved fruitful results. They have reached agreements on how to define status quo bias, explored the various factors affecting the status quo bias, brought forward several kinds of theories to explain why people prefer status. At present, domestic research has just begun on the status quo bias, the existing literature basically is to review research abroad.This study selects college students as subjects, use college students’daily life behavior decision situation instead of the commonly money situation as the experimental material,to verify status quo bias whether exist in college students’daily decision-making. The behavioral decision situation is divided into the following four dimensions:study, consumption, practice, and entertainment. Secondly, this paper discusses on two main factors influencing students’decision-making, internal factors (self interest) and external factors (others), which is more can change the status quo bias of subjects. Finally, to explore the psychological mechanism of college students’status quo bias is loss aversion or anticipated regret.In this study, Experiment1and Experiment2using4*4two factors mixed design, and Experiment3used4*3two factors within-subject design. The results of Experiment1showed that:the status quo bias exist in the college students in the daily behavior decision-making; the status quo bias in learning dimension is significantly lower than in the consume, entertainment, and practice situation.The results of Experiment2showed that:compared with the external factors, internal factors are the main reasons for college students to change the status quo bias, and there is no difference in the different decision-making contexts. The results of Experiment3showed that:the psychological mechanism of college students’status quo bias is caused by loss aversion, rather than anticipated regret, and there is no significant difference in different decision-making contexts.