The existence bias: a systematic replication
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Four experiments were conducted to re-examine the recently proposed “existence bias,” according to which people think that the status quo is good simply because it exists. In Experiment 1, 56 psychology undergraduates read a scenario that described the status quo and a proposal for change in institutional degree requirements. Contrary to the existence bias, in which the status quo is preferred, participants gave a more positive evaluation of the option with more credits. In Experiment 2, with 110 undergraduates from a variety of disciplines, the reasons given for the status quo and the proposed change were manipulated. The existence bias was confirmed, but the effect size was small. Finally, in Experiment 3 (77 psychology students) and Experiment 4 (145 students from various disciplines), in which the students considered the requirements for their own major, participants showed a clear preference for the status quo (with moderate and large effect sizes, respectively). Together, these experiments provide a systematic replication of the existence bias. Suggestions are offered for future research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.013 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it