Default Effect

The default effect is the tendency for people to disproportionately choose whatever option has been pre-selected or set as the default in a decision, rather than actively selecting a different available alternative, even when the alternative may better suit their own preferences. The effect has been demonstrated across a wide range of policy-relevant decisions, most prominently in retirement savings plan enrollment and organ donation registration, where the researchers Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein documented in a 2003 study that countries and institutions using an opt-out default produced dramatically higher participation rates than otherwise similar systems using an opt-in default. The effect is closely related to status quo bias and is considered one of the most robust and widely applied findings in behavioral economics, underlying the practice of choice architecture, in which the setting of a default is used deliberately to influence outcomes without restricting the range of choices available.