Defaults
The Basic Idea
Simply put, a default is the outcome a decision-maker gets under the status quo. It’s the pre-set option that is made available when we do nothing, and requires no effort on our part. For example, when you subscribe to Netflix, your subscription automatically renews at the end of the monthly cycle, unless you choose to cancel it. Automatic renewals are a common example of defaults, and they’re cleverly based on the well-researched principle that human beings are naturally predisposed to inertia – aka the status quo bias.
Defaults, when deployed correctly, can be very effective in encouraging people to take a particular course of action. Another example of a default is an ‘opt-out’- approach to a scheme or policy. Organ donation is commonly used to argue the effectiveness of opt-out policies, since donation rates are much higher in places with opt-out policies than those which use opt-in, where a person needs to take action to become an organ donor.
If you want to encourage some activity, make it easy.
– Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Winner and co-author of Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness1
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
