Fear of coordination costs can increase conservative attitudes

Why individuals sometimes defend social orders that hurt their interests is a fundamental question in the social sciences. Leading accounts emphasize loss aversion or needs to justify established social systems as the main explanations. Across two pre-registered experiments with U.S. respondents, we explored the hypothesis that attachment to an established social convention (the status quo) when facing better alternatives is driven by fear of miscoordination and perceived transition costs. Experiment 1 shows that when a third party institution can step in to ensure a new coordination equilibrium is reached, people become less attached to a suboptimal status quo. With Experiment 2, we show that a greater diversity of preferences within a population increases attachment to the status quo, consistent with the view that the perceived difficulty of coordinating on a new equilibrium makes the status quo attractive. Both hypotheses were supported across a large array of issues involving coordination of multiple individuals, from rules regulating nuclear weapon use to software use to religious rituals in small scale societies. Our paper provides experimental proof that fear of miscoordination can suffice to motivate people to remain conservative with respect to suboptimal social institutions in the presence of better alternatives.