The Status Quo Bias Against Life Extension

And the "robots and dragons" corrective

Photo by David Rotimi on Unsplash

“The idea of prolonging life is awful in and of itself. Imagine a world full of old farts!” — John Derbyshire

Or, imagine a world full of people of vigor and boundless health where no one has to suffer from involuntary aging and infirmity. Why do so many people automatically reject the idea of extended lives? Why are their explicit reasons so flimsy? Why is life extension having to work against the cultural grain?

In previous essays I looked at some of the ways people rationalize aging and the desirability of death. A major source of resistance to life extension comes from a powerful and widely applicable psychological trait: status quo bias (or default bias). This describes our irrational preference for a default option simply because it preserves the current state of affairs.

To be clear, preferring to preserve the current state is not in itself irrational. That depends on the alternatives available and the cost of switching to them. It is considered a cognitive bias when – after considering those possibilities – the default choice is maintained even when alternatives are better in relation to that person’s value. Advocates of “nudging” behavior in a direction seen as better make use of this bias. Let us assume that most people save too little. An employee IRA or 401k could set a default contribution rate higher than most people would choose if it were just one option. The employee can change to a different option but relatively few do.

This nudging tactic is one of the examples presented in the groundbreaking 1988 paper, “Status Quo Bias in Decision Making” by William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser, published by The Journal of Risk and Uncertainty. In an experiment, subjects were given a hypothetical scenario in which they inherited a large amount of money. They then had to decide how to invest the money by choosing from a fixed set of options. Subjects were divided into two groups. One group was presented with a neutral version of the scenario while the other was given a version with a default or already established option.

In the neutral version the subjects had no prior experience to draw upon so there could be no preference to keep things the way they are. In the other group, the subjects were told that the money had already been invested in a specific way. One option was to retain the current investment strategy – the status quo position – and all the other choices were alternatives to the status quo. When presented with the status quo version of the scenario, subjects strongly preferred it over the other options. Samuelson and Zeckhauser set up a variety of different hypothetical scenarios but the strong preference for the status quo remained. They also found that the more choices presented to participants, the greater their preference for the status quo.

The 1988 paper is well worth reading (and quite readable for a research paper) and provides other real-world examples. When a company added new insurance plans, new employees usually selected the new plans but the existing employees selected the old plans much more frequently. When a strip-mining project displaced the residents of a town in Germany, they were offered several plans for the new town to which they would be relocated. The citizens overwhelming choose a plan closest to their old town even though that layout was inefficient and confusing.

In politics, it is well known that the incumbent candidate has an advantage. Other things being equal, they are more likely to win. This effect becomes stronger the more candidates that are in the race. In 1985, Coca Cola presented “New Coke,” with a formula different from the original. Blind taste tests showed that people preferred New Coke yet consumers rejected it in favor of staying with Coke Classic. A few year later, New Coke was taken off the market.

The status quo bias is pervasive. It is easier to spot it historically than to identify it in our own culture. Back when people had owned slaves for generations, slavery was the status quo and widely accepted. Abolitionists had to work hard to overcome the bias. Similar for women’s suffrage. Women voting? That’s just not the way it’s done! Bureaucracies grow over time and cutting them back is hard because the current set of rules and powers has become the status quo. Many people cannot even imagine how things worked before or how they could work differently. As the Coke episode showed quite dramatically, the status quo bias is a major factor in brand allegiance.

The United States still uses the imperial system even though practically all its trading partners have switched to the metric system. Most western countries using a dating system based on the birth of Jesus even though most people are not believers. These two cases are not the best examples of status quo bias because they do involve significant switching costs – new calendars, revised textbooks, revised history books, changes to computerized systems, and so on. In some cases it can be hard to disentangle the effects of status quo bias from switching costs and other factors that matter in rational decision making.

History provides many examples of science struggling to advance because of entrenched viewpoints which had little to do with switching costs and much to do with status quo bias: Galileo, Wegener and continental drift, handwashing to prevent the spread of disease, and so on. Thomas Kuhn highlighted this phenomenon in his account of scientific change in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Status quo bias often puts barriers in the way of better ways of doing things when conditions change.

I do want to emphasize, however, that preferring the status quo or giving it some extra weight compared to other options is not necessarily an irrational bias. Switching costs can be real and substantial. It may be the long-term benefits are great but take some time to reap. But that would be a case of hyperbolic discounting rather than status quo bias.

The principles of conservatism suggest another reason to be cautious in moving drastically away from the status quo. When we are thinking of making major changes in complex systems – like human biology or the economy – we should beware of thinking we understand all the complexity and the outcome of untried interventions. This does not mean we cannot improve things, obviously, but the more complex the system and the more radical and discontinuous a proposed change, the more it is rational to be cautious.

With respect to longevity the status quo is 70 to 80 years. It has been for a long time. In the Bible, in Psalms 90, we find this:

The days of our years are threescore years and ten;
and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years,
yet is their strength labor and sorrow;
for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

But didn’t people in older civilizations die much younger? Not exactly. Life expectancy is usually defined as years on average expected at birth. Many people died early of accident or disease. Those who were lucky enough to avoid or survive those challenges often lived to 70 or more. When children and younger people died, they were “taken before their time.” Lifespans have been creeping up over the last century or so, gradually dragging the status quo along. More people today “by reason of strength they be fourscore years” (80) but beyond that we think of people as lucky (or unlucky, depending on their health). Living to 90 remains impressive and 100+ is remarkable.

“Let us make it possible for people to live to 500 or 1000 or more in perfect health!” Such a proposal is far beyond the status quo. “Let’s cure some of the major diseases and enable people to live another 3 to 5 years” is much closer to the status quo and so finds less resistance. Less, not none. Plenty of people object to even this modest proposal. Even prominent doctors have been known to say that 70 or 75 years is plenty for anyone.

How can we go about checking that our thinking has not fallen prey to the status quo bias? In the case of extended longevity, the bias could be causing us to throw away a vast expanse of life without good reason.

The Reversal Test

When I argue for extending healthy lifespans, the counterarguments seem terribly weak. The best way I can explain this is that these arguments are motivated at least in part by bias. Consider a different case of enhancement. What if we could increase human intelligence? Not just for a few people but for everyone. Surely this would be a good thing. Arguments against doing so seem strained and biased. But those on the other side of the issue could do the same: charge the pro-intelligence augmentation side with bias in favor of something new. Each side has an intuitive sense that the other side is biased. How can we tell which side is more reasonable?

Nick Bostrom and Tony Ord introduced what they call the Reversal Test to separate sound criticisms of a change in some human ability or trait from those resulting merely from resistance to change. If the objection is to an increase in something – years of life or intelligence – then the Reversal Test asks if it would be good thing to reduce the trait. If the objection is to increasing intelligence on the grounds that it will increase boredom or lead to the invention of more powerful weapons, the tests asks us to consider whether it would be improvement to decrease human intelligence.

“Reversal Test: When a proposal to change a certain parameter is thought to have bad overall consequences, consider a change to the same parameter in the opposite direction. If this is also thought to have bad overall consequences, then the onus is on those who reach these conclusions to explain why our position cannot be improved through changes to this parameter. If they are unable to do so, then we have reason to suspect that they suffer from status quo bias.” (p. 664)

If someone claims that life would be worsened if humans were more intelligent and that life would be worsened by decreasing intelligence, then they are in an uncomfortable position. They are implicitly claiming that our current level of intelligence is the best of all possible worlds. It cannot get better than this! But why should we think our intelligence now just happens to be at an optimal level?

Similarly for longevity. If someone claims that life would be worsened if we lived longer, we ask whether they think human life should be shortened. Presumably, the answer will be “no.” The opponent now must show that our current lifespan is optimal. This seems highly implausible considering that lifespan has increased over time and especially rapidly in the last century. If no convincing reason can be given, it seems that the opponent is exhibiting status quo bias. The test helps reveal whether status quo bias was a major factor in causing the initial judgment. As Bostrom and Ord put it:

The rationale of the Reversal Test is simple: if a continuous parameter admits of a wide range of possible values, only a tiny subset of which can be local optima, then it is prima facie implausible that the actual value of that parameter should just happen to be at one of these rare local optima (fig. 1). This is why we claim that the burden of proof shifts to those who maintain that some actual parameter is at such a local optimum: they need to provide some good reason for supposing that it is so.

Sometimes it is justified to prefer the status quo. The Reversal Test does not claim otherwise. It does ask that good and relevant reasons be given. Again, one such reason could be switching costs. Since switching costs can change over time, it might be best to stick with the status quo now but the time may come when the costs have fallen and a move away from the status quo is warranted.

The Double Reversal Test: If someone resists a proposed change, ask them whether they would support reversing that change if it were already implemented. If they would not support undoing the change, it suggests their resistance may stem from status quo bias rather than the merits of the decision. Bostrom and Ord:

Double Reversal Test: Suppose it is thought that increasing a certain parameter and decreasing it would both have bad overall consequences. Consider a scenario in which a natural factor threatens to move the parameter in one direction and ask whether it would be good to counterbalance this change by an intervention to preserve the status quo. If so, consider a later time when the naturally occurring factor is about to vanish and ask whether it would be a good idea to intervene to reverse the first intervention. If not, then there is a strong prima facie case for thinking that it would be good to make the first intervention even in the absence of the natural countervailing factor.

Adapting Bostrom and Ord’s example to replace intelligence with lifespan: A hazardous chemical has made its way up from deep in the Earth to the surface. This chemical will reduce the human lifespan by damaging our DNA repair mechanisms. (Or, in the converse of the plot of Poul Anderson’s Brainwave, we are about to pass through a region of space with intelligence-suppressing effects.) We find a way to counter this effect so that we retain the same lifespan.

After enough years, the new condition becomes the norm, the status quo. Much later we discover that the poisonous chemical is about to disappear (or our planet is about to exit that region of space). Should we now undo the first intervention, thereby letting our lifespan increase? This would be a move away from the most recent status quo. If we would not undo the first intervention, it indicates that their opposition to the initial transition may be influenced by status quo bias rather than the inherent value of the current system. Therefore it seems that it would be good to make the first intervention even without the natural factor.

Learned Helplessness, Robots, and Dragons

Status quo bias goes a long way toward explaining our culture’s puzzling acceptance of aging and death – an acceptance that is only very recently starting to soften. You could also say that this acceptance is an understandable form of learned helplessness. Enough profoundly disturbing and distasteful experiments have shown that animals put in a stressful situation from which there is no escape will eventually stop even trying to escape – even when an exit appears.

Learned helplessness may be a major cause of depression. On a species or cultural level, our repeated failed attempts to beat aging and death have seduced us into giving up – even though we can see a potential exit today.

As Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston puts it in his book on brain preservation, “Some medical literature even uses the oxymoronic term ‘healthy aging’ without irony, despite the fact that currently 100 per cent of people who age sicken and die… the phrase ‘healthy aging’ is reflective of our society’s inability to attend to the harms of aging itself, instead misguidedly focusing on individual age-related diseases.”

Other, related ways to look at the persistence acceptance of this ancient evil tie in here, whether it is comparisons with Stockholm Syndrome or labeling the collection of biasing factors as the “pro-aging trance.” Prolongevist philosophers have created fables to underscore rationalization of aging and death. An early one by Michael Perry envisioned a world where, for thousands of years, people have received harsh daily beatings by robots that descend from the sky. The same special pleading, excuses, and rationalizations are made by some parties to excuse this abusive behavior. Defenders of Just Punishment assert the futility of resisting the mechanized beatings and deplore the goal of “freedom from abuse.” Instead, they propose sensible measures like special clothes to better distribute the force of the blows.

The Dragon-Tyrant (by Stable Diffusion)

An elaboration of the same theme by Nick Bostrom, “The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant,” (also told in video form) tells a tale of a kingdom where a dragon requires the sacrifice of tens of thousands daily. (The dragon is a personification of the ageing process and death.) When someone figures out a way to stop this, the usual apologists pop up to explain why this victimization is really good, natural, and beneficial. The statements by the morality advisor of the kingdom closely mirror real bioethicists’ apologies for aging and death.

You might call this fable-powered attempt to shift our intuitions the “robots and dragons” approach. These stories and fables and others like them help to underscore the absurdity of the status quo in passively accepting aging. They help to overcome status quo bias by vividly portraying an obviously absurd cultural belief which is shown to be exactly like the “pro-aging trance.” Another excellent example, although going well beyond anti-aging, is Marc Stiegler’s short story, “The Gentle Seduction.” While scientific research is vital to tackle aging, these examples underline the power of intelligent fiction to clear the way for greater support of scientific and technical efforts to push back our ancient enemy.