This is bioethics bytes with me, David.
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
Bioethics Bytes is made in association with Oxford's Uhiro Centre for Practical Ethics and made possible by grant from the Wellcome Trust.
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Suppose a genetic engineering breakthrough made it simple, safe and cheap to increase people's intelligence.
Nonetheless, if you ask the averagely intelligent person on the Clapham omnibus whether we should tamper with our genes to boost our brains, he or she might recoil at the notion.
Nick Bostrom, director of the future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, suspects that this reaction may be a result of what he calls status quo bias.
Nick Bostrom, welcome to bioethics bytes.
Good to be with you.
We're going to focus on the status quo bias.
What is that?
A status quo bias is a preference for the status quo just because it is the status quo, a preference that is inappropriate or irrational.
So could you give an example of that?
Well, cognitive psychologists have experimented in different settings with people's responses, and they find that in many cases, just because an alternative is presented as the status quo, it makes it more attractive.
One experiment, subjects were given either a decorated coffee cup or a large chocolate bar randomly, and then they were allowed to exchange the particular gift they had been given for the other gift just by holding up a card saying trade.
And it turns out that in this kind of experiment, 90% of the subjects prefer to stick with their original gift.
This is known as the endowment effect.
As soon as something has become yours, you become unwilling to part with it, even for something that ex ante would have been just as valuable.
And there are many, many other cases where it doesn't seem that you can explain this away by postulating that people have formed some special emotional attachment to it, but it just seems that, at least in some of these cases, there is a kind of cognitive error.