Switching costs
Why do so few people ever change their mind?
The cost of changing your mind
Why do so few people ever change their mind? Students, who are in college so that they can change their minds, come out the way they went in. People, when faced with facts plainly contrary to their point of view, refuse to change their opinion. Why?
One answer lies in what economists call switching costs. It is expensive to discard a point of view in whose acquisition one has invested considerable resources and to switch to another point of view that requires further resource investment to understand and articulate it.
Why do so few people ever change their mind? One answer lies in what economists call switching costs. Because switching is expensive, competitors facilitate it by fully or partially subsidizing the cost.
This is easily understood if you think of computer programs. The first word processing program I learned was a product called WordPerfect. I was thoroughly familiar with it, and I could do marvelous things with the program. In contrast, I was barely familiar with Microsoft’s Word software even though it became the dominant word processing software. So long as WordPerfect served me well enough, I did not wish to incur the switching cost to learn Word.
Why do the English drive on the “wrong” side of the road? Why do Americans use cumbersome non-metric measures such as miles and pounds and degrees Fahrenheit? Why do most musicians stick to playing one instrument only? Switching cost. Once one system is learned, why incur the cost of learning another one? A bad system can amble along and survive if the cost of switching to an alternative is high. This holds for “bad” normative, moral systems!
Subsidizing switching
Because switching is expensive, competitors facilitate it by fully or partially subsidizing the cost of switching. Hence the free product samples you get in the mail or at the mall. Your resistance to change must be overcome by offering an inducement.
In the old days, marriage dissolution was rare—even for bad marriages—because the social cost of switching to another partner was high. Today, the cost of switching is low and an economist would expect higher divorce rates. It is not that marriages today are necessarily worse than they used to be, or that social mores have declined. It is that the social cost of switching has declined.
Punishing switching
The opposite of facilitating switching with free product samples, no-fault divorce laws, and the like, is to punish switching or to increase the switching cost.
For example, people are genetically more alike than nation-states would have us believe. Yet states proclaim rights over people born to their territory and are loath to let them go. By making the cost of switching between nationalities high, they create tensions among people that would not exist if state-switching were as easy as switching location within a state.
The cost of switching one’s personal identity also is high. Frequently, interest groups want me to be something I’d rather not be. They want to hold on to me, for example, as a “black” or a “white” person while I’d rather switch to be neither. But switching to a “non-group”—a person—is made socially costly. What appears to be a racial association is a way by which leaders can prevent dissociation into a more unified humanity.
Dissociation is made costly. If you switch your nationality, you lose your birth heritage. If you switch your identity, you are marked a traitor to your group. Thus, religions welcome the converted and condemn apostates. Inducement and punishment are sides of the same coin.
Switching can be facilitated; it can also be punished. Religions welcome the converted and condemn apostates.
Once the idea crosses our mind, switch prevention or switch facilitation finds a wide range of unexpected applications. This is a beauty of strong concepts with which to ponder the world.
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