#23 Status Quo Bias: Why old, stubborn people kind of have a point
Everybody loves change, right? Hell no! And it’s not entirely our fault. In this episode, Mel and Dan explore why we'll often go to huge lengths just to make sure everything stays exactly the same.
Mel: 00:00 I can think of two fundamental reasons why we would want to maintain the current state of affairs.
Dan: 00:05 Sorry, I'm slightly confused. Are you telling me what you're about to do or is this actually recording for the show?
Mel: 00:08 Hi and welcome to Bad Decisions.
Dan: 00:29 The podcast that helps us understand why we choose what we choose.
Mel: 00:32 Why we think what we think.
Dan: 00:33 And how to exploit this stuff for fun and commercial gain.
Mel: 00:35 I'm Dr. Mel Weinberg. I'm a Performance Psychologist.
Dan: 00:38 And I'm Dan Monheit, Co-Founder of Hardhat.
Mel: 00:39 Let's do it.
Mel: 00:50 Hey, Dan?
Dan: 00:51 Yes, Mel?
Mel: 00:53 Want to do an experiment?
Dan: 00:55 Yes. Yes, I do.
Mel: 00:57 Once again, you are becoming a somewhat unwilling participant in one of my studies.
Dan: 01:03 Life as a guinea pig.
Mel: 01:03 It's not really my study though, let's be honest. I'm putting you in somebody else's study. We're just replaying somebody else's study.
Dan: 01:10 All right. This is going to get weird. Let's just do this.
Mel: 01:12 Okay. So I've got something for you, Dan. It's a virtual reality headset that you can wear and when you're in this virtual reality world, you're going to have a fantastic time. Everything that happens is going to be really fun, extraordinarily pleasant, exciting, it's going to just be full of positive emotions. You're really going to love it.
Dan: 01:37 Okay. This sounds like a good experiment so far.
Mel: 01:38 Okay, the thing is that once we put the headset on, you can't take it off.
Dan: 01:43 Ever?
Mel: 01:44 Ever. So I guess what I want to know is, do you want to subject yourself to a life of virtual reality that is absolutely wonderful and only going to be happy, not particularly real, happy nonetheless, but you're not going to know that it's not real, it's going to feel really real to you. Or do you want to stay with your current life, which may or may not be as happy as what you might get in virtual reality world of happiness?
Dan: 02:09 Well, for the record, my current life is just fine, thank you very much.
Mel: 02:12 That's good to know.
Dan: 02:12 But it's not ... Real life is not wall to wall happiness. We already have a parental advisory, right? This sounds weird as fuck. I want no part in this.
Mel: 02:25 Why not?
Dan: 02:27 In this thing forever?
Mel: 02:28 Yeah. It's going to be fun.
Dan: 02:30 It's a terrible idea. Life is surely about more than virtual ... Virtual reality experiences are kind of cool and fun for a little bit, but a full life and a fulfilling life is surely about real reality-
Mel: 02:44 Real reality? Yeah, this is some of your best work here.
Dan: 02:48 More so than reality of the virtual kind.
Mel: 02:49 Okay. So you don't want to play?
Dan: 02:50 Don't want to play.
Mel: 02:51 Okay, fine. I have another question for you.
Dan: 02:53 Okay. I thought there might be because otherwise this is a very lame experiment.
Mel: 02:57 So you're just chilling in your mansion on a Saturday afternoon with your supermodel wife.
Dan: 03:04 Yep. Got it.
Mel: 03:04 Just everything is just going wonderful. You've got a whole ... You're pretty much drowning in chocolate, but it's amazing. This is my idea of virtual reality heaven.
Dan: 03:12 This is bad for the carpet in my million dollar mansion, but let's go with it.
Mel: 03:16 Whatever. You're having a great time and then somebody knocks on the door and you're like, "Ah." Well, you've already said fuck, so you go, "Ah, fuck. I don't want to get up."
Dan: 03:23 Oh, the doctor says fuck as well? Jeez.
Mel: 03:26 Yeah, but what I'm saying as if I'm you and I go, "Fuck, I don't want to get up and go to the door. I'm just having such a good time."
Dan: 03:31 Yep, with my supermodel wife, and my chocolate bath in my living room.
Mel: 03:35 But you go answer the door and there's this curious looking, formally dressed ... we'll make it a man ... standing there. The man looks very official and he says to you, "Look Dan, I've got something to tell you. I'm from a virtual reality company and you've been living in a virtual reality world your entire life."
Dan: 03:54 Right. Feels very Men in Black. Is the man at my door Will Smith?
Mel: 03:59 It could be if it makes it seem better for you.
Will Smith: 04:00 "You know what the difference is between you and me? I make this look good."
Mel: 04:12 "And look, I'm really sorry. You've been part of this world, but actually you weren't supposed to be. We've made a huge mistake. Look, I want to give you a choice. Do you want to stay in this wonderful virtual reality world that is all that you've ever known or would you like us to take this headset off for you and go back to your real life? I should let you know that your real life is nothing quite like this. What would you like to do?"
Dan: 04:36 Well, this is an annoying question, isn't it? I mean, it's different. Maybe I would be more inclined to stay in my mansion and chocolate bath and with my supermodel wife - all of which things I obviously have in my real life as well ... but this, yeah, it's different. It's just different, okay? Maybe I-
Mel: 04:55 It's different!
Dan: 04:56 I want to stay! Go away I'm shutting the door!
Mel: 04:59 Okay. So what we've just demonstrated, and the reason that I asked you the first instance, and I guess we talked it through that you actually found it, sort of in a way, immoral to choose that virtual life because you have this preference for reality.
Dan: 05:12 Yes.
Mel: 05:12 In the second instance, all of a sudden reality didn't seem so good to you, did it?
Dan: 05:15 Well, I had a different reality, but yeah.
Mel: 05:19 You had a different reality. And this is an illustration. It's a thought experiment that has been commonly used to illustrate what's known as the status quo bias.
Dan: 05:25 Ooh.
Mel: 05:26 Yeah, the status quo bias. And the status quo bias is our tendency to prefer what is familiar and what we already know and to maintain the current state of affairs.
Dan: 05:36 So this sounds ... I feel like we did something like this. This was the default bias maybe, which is exactly like-
Mel: 05:42 It's similar to the default bias.
Dan: 05:42 ... like the default option?
Mel: 05:43 Yeah, which is that we stick to what we already know, but ... So it basically has a similar outcome in that we will stick with the current state of affairs most of the time or whatever's presented to us. The motivation underlying it is different. In the default bias, we talked about how when we have a whole bunch of different choices offered to us that the default one just seems easy. So we'll stick with what we know, but we'll do it because it's the easiest. It's just out of fatigue and laziness.
Dan: 06:06 Yeah. Just like going with inertia.
Mel: 06:08 Yeah. Not doing anything is easier than doing something. With status quo bias, we'll still maintain the current state of affairs, but the motivation behind it is different. The motivation behind it is not to avoid making a choice, it's to avoid change.
Dan: 06:20 Ah, so this is like old people getting angry about society progressing, perhaps.
Mel: 06:25 Sure. Yeah. It could be something like that.
Dan: 06:25 Or maybe like if, let's say, if I lived in a cute little village and there was a lake running by my house and there was a factory and the factory wanted to start dumping chemicals into the lake.
Mel: 06:36 Yeah?
Dan: 06:36 Go with me on this. The default bias, I would to do nothing because that's the easiest course of action. The status quo bias, I would be up in arms campaigning for that factory not to be there.
Mel: 06:49 That's right. So it actually motivates action to maintain-
Dan: 06:52 Got it.
Mel: 06:52 ... the current state of the affairs which are different to doing nothing.
Dan: 06:55 Yeah. It's like, "I'm going to do a whole bunch of work right now so I don't have to change later."
Mel: 06:58 Yeah. Hey, so I know we already did some research and you've already been a participant in one of my studies. Do you want to hear about some other research?
Dan: 07:04 Do I ever!
Mel: 07:04 I know you do.
Dan: 07:04 Let's look at some research.
Mel: 07:13 Okay. I sort of already gave you the most fun research about this, so what I'm left with is some really boring research to tell you.
Dan: 07:20 What? You don't find research boring.
Mel: 07:20 I know, but it's just not the most exciting. So we'll just sort of skim over it a little bit, but we will pay credit to the researchers.
Dan: 07:28 You've got to work on your sales game. We can talk about this.
Mel: 07:30 In 1988 Samuelson and Zeckhauser introduced the status quo bias to us and they basically did it by presenting different scenarios to participants where they had a choice to make that involved making a change. In some situations they were just given all these neutral options of what they could choose. So you're a serious reader of the financial pages, right? You know your shit when it comes to that. But until recently you haven't had the money-
Dan: 07:56 Potty mouth today. Jeez.
Mel: 07:58 Sorry. Sorry, mom.
Dan: 08:01 Kids in the car.
Mel: 08:01 You haven't had the funds to invest, but you've sort of known what to do. Then all of a sudden, Great Uncle Dave dies, so it leaves you with a whole bunch of money and now you've got the option. And your options are that you can invest that money in a high risk company, a moderate risk company, some municipal bonds, whatever it is the options that they were given, and treasury bills. So four neutral options are given and it's up to you. In the second option, participants were presented with the same scenario except this time that they were told that a large portion of the portfolio was already invested in a moderate risk company.
Dan: 08:32 In Great Uncle Dave's portfolio?
Mel: 08:34 Yeah. So there was already sort of a status quo of current state of affairs that you are probably going to be motivated to maintain and that's exactly what they found. That when the second scenario was presented, a much greater proportion of participants opted to just invest it all in the moderate risk company. Just stick with what we already have. Don't make a change.
Dan: 08:54 Yeah. I guess maybe where this comes to play as a heuristic is sometimes, I guess, our status quo bias gets us to make suboptimal choices. Maybe investing in a high risk or a lower risk company would have been the better option.
Mel: 09:05 Would actually be better.
Dan: 09:06 Objectively, rationally that would be the better option. But our over desire for status quo kind of overrides the better outcome.
Mel: 09:12 Yeah. So let's explore this a little further because why on earth would we be motivated to make a decision that is not in the best interests of our future, perhaps?
Dan: 09:20 Yeah, because being human is hard.
Mel: 09:22 So following this 1988 article by Samuelson and Zeckhauser, we had some helpful input from our buddy, Great Uncle ...
Dan: 09:29 Great Uncle Dave?
Mel: 09:31 No.
Dan: 09:33 Will Smith?
Mel: 09:33 Great Uncle Danny Kahneman.
Dan: 09:34 Oh, Danny Kahneman.
Mel: 09:35 Yeah. Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler in 1991 shed some further light on why we fall victim to this status quo bias. Now first of all, there's one sort of fundamental go-to reason that I can think of. Before we even go into Kahneman, this is Dr. Weinberg's view. Hasn't published it in a paper, but-
Dan: 09:52 Weinberg and Monheit, 2019.
Mel: 09:56 And it comes down to a simple word, survival. Because ultimately, before we do anything else, our underlying motivation for everything is to keep ourselves alive.
Dan: 10:06 Okay. Yeah, I see where you're going with this.
Mel: 10:06 And if you think about maintaining the current state of affairs, basically we might be wanting to stick with what we know because simply it has kept us alive to this date.
Dan: 10:16 Well, I'm alive right now. So therefore, whatever I'm doing right now is working.
Mel: 10:19 You've been doing something right. And so there's a huge risk involved in actually making a change.
Dan: 10:24 Yeah, like right now. Breathing, alive. What if I stopped breathing? Not alive.
Mel: 10:28 Don't do it. Not worth the risk.
Dan: 10:29 I see why this works.
Mel: 10:30 Right? So fundamentally we can understand why we would be inherently motivated to just keep things as they are.
Dan: 10:35 Yeah.
Mel: 10:36 Cool. It keeps us alive. Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler put it their own language of loss aversion.
Dan: 10:44 I remember this one.
Mel: 10:44 Yes. So we're highly averse to making changes because we don't want to take the chance that we might make a bad choice.
Dan: 10:51 Yeah. And so if I were to wind back to episode two, three, whatever it was, early we talked about loss aversion, was it where we feel losses twice as much as we feel gains?
Mel: 11:02 Yep. Yep. So if we were highly motivated not to lose, we're actually more motivated not to lose than we are to gain something.
Dan: 11:08 Twice as motivated not to lose.
Mel: 11:10 You could say.
Dan: 11:10 I just did that maths in my head right now.
Mel: 11:12 Wow.
Dan: 11:12 So I guess with the status quo thing, it's like, "Well, unless I can clearly see that changing is going to get me at least twice as good, I'm just going to stay with this."
Mel: 11:21 Right. So it's much easier to stay with what ... Well, it's not that it's much easier because that would be default bias, but we are much more highly motivated to not make a change than we are to make a change. Okay?
Dan: 11:31 That makes sense.
Mel: 11:31 The reason is that they say that disadvantages of leaving something loom larger than the advantages.
Dan: 11:38 Say that again?
Mel: 11:39 The disadvantages of leaving the current state of affairs loom much larger than the advantages or the possible advantages.
Dan: 11:47 So when you say loom larger, it's like in our mind we blow them up to be potentially disastrous?
Mel: 11:52 Yeah. Yeah.
Dan: 11:52 I mean, so I think that and also the wanting to stay alive survival thing make a lot of sense of why we would favor status quo. They're both kind of negative, like kind of fear-based.
Mel: 12:01 Welcome to psychology.
Dan: 12:04 Yeah, yeah. I mean, something else I was thinking about was maybe there might be some positive reasons why we're wired for this as well. And I mean, one of these is around the idea of compound interest ... just go with me on this. So in financial and wealth creation circles, what a lot of longterm level-headed wealthy investors talk about is the, in air quotes "magic of compound interest" and the idea that putting a dollar aside a day in your teens and in your 20s just has this insanely huge impact on your ultimate wealth in your 50s, 60s, and 70s because of compound interest. Every extra dollar you put in, you get interest on and then you get interest on the interest and that multiplied over days and weeks and months and years ends up being ginormous.
Dan: 12:46 And so it makes sense and it's very demonstrable through the data with money and you can calculate it for the money, but there's also, I guess, an idea that compound interest and the untold gains you get from compound interest extend to other parts of our lives as well. So it might be relationships or our health and wellness or fitness or our fields of study. And the idea that if you invest a little bit in the same relationship every day for 10 years, you are going to end up with a deeper, more fulfilling relationship by a significant order than if instead you'd invested in five relationships for two years each.
Mel: 13:17 Got it. I like this.
Dan: 13:18 Or if you study a little bit about psychology everyday you're going to be-
Mel: 13:22 Better for it in the long run.
Dan: 13:24 Than just trying to plunge yourself for a year into studying for it. So this idea that holding the line and just chipping away and doing a little bit of the same thing over and over and over again actually has exponential benefits, not just incremental benefits. Go status quo bias.
Mel: 13:41 Yeah. And it's funny how we think that we want change. How much do we think that we want change? We're like, "I don't like doing the same thing over and over again."
Dan: 13:49 Because change is interesting. It's fun. It's exciting.
Mel: 13:50 But compound interest says that actually we do change, it's just a more gradual sort of less-
Dan: 13:56 It's a boring change.
Mel: 13:57 It's a boring change, but that's okay. And the funny thing is, and we get this in happiness research all the time, that even though people are highly motivated to change their mood or to change their circumstances, we actually don't like it very much. And as soon as we do change our circumstances, we're highly motivated to adapt to it as quickly as possible. We want to make it as familiar as possible because we actually prefer familiarity even though we think we want change. It's like when we think we want choice with default bias and choice paradox and that. We think we want a whole lot of choice, but then when we're faced with a whole lot of choice, we're actually uncomfortable with it. It's like we think we want change, but actually we don't. As soon as we change something, we actually want to get to know it better. So if you moved to another city, you think, "Oh, it's going to be wonderful," but then things are unfamiliar so you'll just start taking the same road to work everyday to try and make it more familiar again.
Dan: 14:43 That makes sense. And I guess you look at the explosion of McDonald's in every country in the world and Starbucks in most countries in the world and people go to these countries for new experiences and then there's just a line of Westerners outside of McDonald's in Japan. Guys you all could have just stayed home.
Mel: 14:56 Yeah. We just want to know what ... We just want stability.
Dan: 15:00 Yeah. So I mean, this is interesting from a sales perspective because when you're selling to somebody, you have to convince them that change is good, but you also have to convince them that it's going to be okay and it's going to be familiar. And I guess it's interesting to think about the way that you play those two sides of the same coin.
Mel: 15:18 Yeah. I mean, because the whole thing is that people don't want to change because it's perceived as dangerous. So your job, I guess, is to show them that, "No, it's okay. It's safe. It's safe. Make this change. Let me take you along on this change. You'll be fine."
Dan: 15:29 I think it's interesting to think about this from two perspectives. One is from retaining existing customers, so selling more and different things to existing customers versus acquiring new customers. So if we think about retaining existing customers or upselling, upgrading existing customers, there's a principle from the world of design that I'd like to borrow and that principle is Maya, M-A-Y-A. It's an acronym for most advanced, yet acceptable. And so the idea with this is when you are designing a new interface, a new product, a new service, what your job as a designer is, is to push the design as far as you can, as advanced as you can, with a caveat - yet acceptable. So you can't push it so far that people don't know what to do with it. If you were going to redesign a remote control, it should be sufficiently better than the current remote control, but not so much better that people-
Mel: 16:21 People don't like it.
Dan: 16:21 ... are just confused and don't get it.
Mel: 16:23 And it's interesting to think because if you're a designer you probably want to be as creative and as innovative as possible and design the most incredible, amazing thing. The thing is you're not going to have much luck selling it, are you, if people aren't ready to accept it?
Dan: 16:35 Exactly. Exactly. So if you've got a client who's doing a little bit of work with you and you have this vision for them of how far you want to take their business and where you want to go, I guess the job as a salesperson is to work out, what is the furthest I can push them along this journey? Which might only be 10% of what you've got in mind at a time, but still making it acceptable-
Mel: 16:52 Keep it safe.
Dan: 16:52 ... and just the right amount of exciting and tantalizing, but everything's still kind of going to be cool. We're not going to change everything straight away.
Mel: 16:59 Okay, that makes sense.
Dan: 17:00 I think that MAYA principal is interesting from a retention perspective. From a new business perspective, where I really think about status quo bias coming into play is especially in B2B sales, so companies trying to sell things to other companies. And the reason this is a bigger issue in B2B sales is ... Well, there's a couple. Number one, usually with B2B sales the risk of changing from one software provider to another or one agency to another is high and kind of obvious. So it's like, "If I switch over from one IT system to another and it doesn't work, it is going to be disastrous and I'm going to lose my job and my whole team's going to be fired and we're going to cost the company millions and millions of dollars." Whereas, the benefits are a little bit hazy, a little bit unclear and they're probably not that good, like moving to a slightly better email system or a slightly better file sharing system. It's a marginal benefit traded off for a potentially catastrophic disaster. So that's one issue. And yeah, there's that saying, "Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM." It plays right into that status quo bias. Just keep doing the same thing, don't mess it up. Don't shoot for the stars, don't mess it up.
Dan: 18:05 The other thing that makes B2B sales really susceptible to status quo bias is usually B2B sales are group decisions, and what we have when we have group decisions is you have lots of people with different opinions and different criteria for how they're making the decisions. Procurement might have a different lens to IT, and IT might have a different lens to Sales and Marketing, and Sales and Marketing might have a different lens to the Legal team. And what happens is all these people have different lenses and different things and different risks they're thinking about when they make these decisions, and all of these differences create conversations and arguments between lots and lots of people. And the more conversations and debates and arguments that you have, the more complicated it gets. And what happens when it gets more complicated and it gets too hard?
Mel: 18:45 It's not fun.
Dan: 18:46 It's not fun and we just default to status quo, and we just push the decision off. So because of that, status quo bias can be a real issue in trying to sell something into a business. And what's interesting here is the conventional wisdom of what you're meant to do in this situation is you're meant to divide and conquer. Let's say you're trying to sell on a new software system to a cross functional team, and you can see that everyone's got different criteria. So what you do is you basically build a case for the IT guy about what it's going to do for them, and then you build a separate case for the marketing people and what it's going to do for them, and then you build a separate case for the procurement people.
Mel: 19:20 This sounds like a lot of work.
Dan: 19:22 It's a lot of work, but these are usually big multimillion dollar deals, longterm deals, because once you're in the status quo is going to keep you in there. Normally the conventional wisdom is divide and conquer, win over one person at a time. And actually what seems to happen when you do that is you make it worse because you give people more things to think about and they just throw more complexity into the mix and you get less agreement between the group because they're all thinking about their own different things that you've given.
Mel: 19:47 They're all thinking from different perspectives. Yeah.
Dan: 19:48 Yeah. More conversation, more confusion.
Mel: 19:51 Much easier to just stick with the status quo.
Dan: 19:53 Exactly. So instead, what you're meant to do from a new customer acquisition perspective based on trying to overcome the status quo bias, is try and get everybody to unite around the common idea that doing nothing is the riskiest thing that you can do.
Mel: 20:07 Mm-hmm (affirmative). So you're talking about in terms of what we said before about the disadvantages looming larger than the advantages-
Dan: 20:14 Absolutely.
Mel: 20:15 ... of change and what you're saying is actually, what if we make staying the same actually look really disadvantageous?
Dan: 20:21 Yes. So rather than trying to sell each person in on the benefits, "It's going to save you some money and it's going to make you look better in your job and it's going to make your stuff a little bit quicker." That's really hard. Instead get everybody focused on, we call it the burning platform, the disastrous consequences that are only going to happen if we stay with the current situation and everybody can then agree, "Yes, you're right. Staying with where we are is terrible. We do need to change."
Mel: 20:45 And that even if change is terrible, actually staying with what we have is worse.
Dan: 20:49 More terrible, exactly. So think in B2B sense, that's like a multilayered, multivariate way of having to overcome this problem and when you move it over into the B2C lens, it becomes a lot simpler. So where we see this playing out in the B2C world is in the phone wars where now a lot of the conversation is around cameras, and Google are running a lot of ads showing how bad the photos will be with an Apple phone ... Sorry, an Apple phone? An iPhone. And how you're basically going to miss all these amazing moments of your kids or of your friends and family because you're using an inferior camera and it's too dark or it's blurry. So they've done that to make people feel like the status quo is really risky, and then at the same time they've invested in a lot of software that makes it very, very easy for people to pour their whole life from an iPhone over to an Android phone and, hey presto, they've been able to steal a lot of market share over the last couple of years.
Mel: 21:40 Cool.
Dan: 21:41 So that's what brands can do.
Mel: 21:42 Good tips.
Dan: 21:43 Yeah. Big. Dense. You can play it in slow-mo if there was too much in that. What about peeps?
Mel: 21:48 So just for the ordinary people out there, we've got to think of this status quo bias as something that is there to help us. At the end of the day, it's there to keep us safe. Yeah? That's what it's there for. Sometimes, and it becomes problematic when that emotional survival-based decision stops us from making a decision that's actually rationally in our best interest. So we need to actually be maybe more conscious of doing something so that we can actually flip the decision from an emotional one to a rational one. And this sort of applies for all things but specifically in the context of the status quo bias, when it comes to weighing up the pros and cons of making a change, sometimes something that's just really simple but very effective is just to make a list. Because when you think about the disadvantages and the possible advantages, we might go, "Oh, there's a few disadvantages but there's a whole lot of advantages" but the disadvantages actually seem in our head to be a lot bigger. They loom larger.
Dan: 22:41 Yeah. And they feel real.
Mel: 22:42 We focus on them. They feel a lot stronger, and so we're sort of more emotionally invested towards not going with the change and just because we don't want to lose. So sometimes if we just literally make a list, if we can turn the subjective experience into an objective one by literally writing down, seeing a list of, "Yeah, there's a couple of disadvantages. There might be three disadvantages, but there's 45 advantages," we're making or we can then make a more rational decision. We're better placed to make a more rational decision.
Dan: 23:10 Yeah. So what you're saying is, status quo bias prevents us making better rational decisions because we're deciding emotionally.
Mel: 23:16 Emotionally, yeah.
Dan: 23:16 What we should do is get out of that emotional decision making state and make it a rational decision.
Mel: 23:20 Make a list!
Dan: 23:20 Make a list!
Mel: 23:20 Simple.
Dan: 23:21 My mom was all over this. How many years did you study for?
Mel: 23:25 Simple things. Not relevant.
Dan: 23:32 Awesome. All right, so put a ribbon on this.
Mel: 23:32 Well-
Dan: 23:32 Oh, there's more?
Mel: 23:32 One last thing.
Dan: 23:33 Oh, good.
Mel: 23:33 We talked about things staying the same and sometimes people with status quo think, "Oh, but I don't want to stay the same. I want a change." So I just want to say, be okay with being boring.
Dan: 23:43 Oh. Are you saying I'm boring?
Mel: 23:46 No, just in general. It's okay to stick if you're sort of doing the same thing over and over again and being familiar. Recognize that being boring, like you said with compound interest, being boring and doing little things over time can actually have some advantages in the long run as well.
Dan: 24:00 All right, nice. Wrap it up for me. Status quo bias is ...
Mel: 24:03 The preference to keep things as they are.
Dan: 24:05 And sometimes that's good. Sometimes that sucks.
Mel: 24:08 You figure it out.
Dan: 24:09 For brands to get over this, we need to look at how we basically cause more risk to be associated with the current status while smoothing the transition over to something new. And for peeps, make a list.
Mel: 24:21 Make a list.
Dan: 24:21 That is five-star advice from Dr. Mel.
Mel: 24:26 That's what you get.
Dan: 24:26 I'm just trying to keep up here.
Mel: 24:27 All right, thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time.
Dan: 24:30 You'll hear us next time.
Mel: 24:31 That too.
Dan: 24:32 Awesome.