This is Bioethics Bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Bioethics Bites is made an association with Oxford's Uhero Center for Practical Ethics

and made possible by a grant from the Welcome Trust.

For more information about bioethics bites,

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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 Bostram, 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 Bites. 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

that 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.

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