Default by design
A preset repeated for long enough becomes a habit.
In software a default guides behavior and saves thinking. In life we inherit presets without ever seeing the choice that made them. Change the preset and the behavior follows, with nothing banned and nobody told off.
What we say
“Any questions?”
Closing a meeting with “does anyone have any questions?” makes silence the easy answer: it treats a question as an interruption, and nobody volunteers to be the one who did not follow. “What questions do you have?” asks for the same thing while taking for granted that there are some.
Same questionasked so that answering is the ordinary thing
What we do
Plant-forward menus
At three conferences, lunch was booked with the meat buffet as the standard and the vegetarian one a click away. Then it was booked the other way round. Nothing was removed and nobody was refused anything: only the order of the two changed.
2% → 87%chose the plant meal when it was the one already booked
What we accept
The green tariff
A German supplier made renewable electricity the contract you get unless you say otherwise. It cost more than the ordinary one, and opting out was a click. Customers stayed on it anyway.
Nearly 10xbought the greener tariff, though it was the dearer one
What “default by design” means
Setting the baselines of everyday life on purpose, so that the easiest path is also the clearest and the most welcoming, without mandating anything or asking anyone to change.
Inheriting nineteenth-century combat metaphors, and habits nobody alive chose, without ever asking who set them or why.
Setting a baseline on purpose, and leaving every person free to swap it or keep it.
- Nudging healthy and sustainable food choices, Hansen, Schilling & Malthesen, Journal of Public Health 43(2), 2021. Three randomised field experiments: the vegetarian choice went from 2% to 87%, 6% to 86% and 12.5% to 89% when it was the default, and most participants said they liked the change.
- Domestic uptake of green energy promoted by opt-out tariffs, Ebeling & Lotz, Nature Climate Change 5, 2015. A randomised trial in Germany: making the dearer green contract the default raised purchases of it nearly tenfold.