Digital SAT Reading and Writing Practice Question #363

In behavioral economics, the "endowment effect" is a hypothesis suggesting that people ascribe more value to items simply because they own them. In a classic experiment, participants were gifted a ceramic mug and subsequently offered the chance to trade it for a similarly priced Swiss pen. The vast majority refused the trade. Skeptics, however, argue that this refusal does not demonstrate the endowment effect, but rather "status quo bias"—a generalized psychological preference to keep things exactly as they currently are in order to avoid the minor cognitive effort associated with making any exchange. To isolate the true cause, a new study gifted participants a mug, but then immediately and forcibly replaced it with the pen before asking if they would like to trade the pen back to regain the original mug. If the skeptics' "status quo bias" theory is entirely correct, which choice most logically completes the text?