The default effect: why we renounce our ability to choose | Hacker News Reader

The default effect: why we renounce our ability to choose

nesslabs.com

63 pointsherbertl38 comments

> It doesn’t have to be about big decisions. Next time you notice yourself grabbing the exact same snack between two meetings, ask yourself: is there another option?

Personally, I think this is the worst advice. Don't spend time thinking about unimportant things. I think it's a major contributor to the default effect.

There are so many choices to make everyday that thinking about each one becomes exhausting/overwhelming so people just pick the default all the time (even when it matters).

The key is figuring out what matters and what doesn't (to you) and only thinking about what does.

Also setting yourself up for "good" defaults is a way to work towards an outcome without having to constantly make good choices. E.g if you never buy unhealthy snacks, you'll never have unhealthy snacks at home, so picking any random snack (the default) works towards living a healthier life.

> Don't spend time thinking about unimportant things. I think it's a major contributor to the default effect.

Maybe? I get the Steve Jobs “only own one outfit so no energy is wasted deciding what to wear” thing, but it’s a fine line between that and the “wear a dark suit because everyone else does” thing.

> The key is figuring out what matters and what doesn’t (to you) and only thinking about what does.

Lots of respect for recognizing that not everyone will have the same answers. But, what if “what matters” is learning new things, or challenging oneself, or being a generalist? There are a lot of areas that (some) people find fulfilling that don’t lend themselves to single-minded focus. For those things and people, maybe this is good advice.

Is there really, though? One is making your own decision then re-using that cached result, the other is following the herd. (Unless, of course, following the herd is your carefully considered shortcut to shedding cognitive load… which might have some merit!)

Realistically the way most of us will choose is that we go with our defaults most of the time and occasionally invest some time and energy to rethink our defaults actively.

The majority will not stand in front of their wardrobe every day and confront the choice of outfit on a fundamental level each time no matter if they are a boring person or a avantgarde noise musician. Most people decide once and stay with their decisions, and revisit them every now and then when they feel it is not appropriate anymore.

Doing it that way allows us to invest more time than we would have every day into some decision and harvest the fruit of that investigation for a while. The alternative would be to spend more time each day and more importantly: live with the uncertainty if you will find something suitable each day.

Whether the outfit is a lazy black suit or the most high fashion doesn't really change the way you decide. One can think long and hard and still come up with a boring and tasteless choice after. Others might not think a lot at all and effortlessly choose interesting things. This has to do with aesthetics and is usually about time/energy that has been invested elsewhere.

The point is: choices cost energy. Choices we take every day take energy every day. Not fundamentally questioning your whole existence up to that point every day is resonable.

And as a person who only wears black I can tell you, there are so many nuances of "black" you will need to match... but anyway not everybody cares about their wardrobe in the same detail. I know enough people who would just throw on the next tshirt in the pile, those clean jeans and whatever sneakers are not muddy from the last rain and call it a day. Everybody makes choices from time to time just not all about the same topics.

In the case of outfits there seems to be a deeper psychological mechanism involved. I usually wear black jeans, but also have brown and blue ones. Black is more easily combinable with diffrent colors of shirts. So it is an easy choice in the morning: black jeans + any of my shirts. When I wear the brown shirt, I have to choose a bit more carfully, but it is not really a big deal. However, what I observe is that I fell always a bit uncomfotable after I made my decision to wear brown. It feels a little bit like I am in disguise.

A have similar observation when going to some of my favourite restaurants. Even when I take my time to look through the menu, I very often choose the same dish or from only two or three standard alternatives, although I was actively deliberating to choose something else this time.

It really seems that it is not only the effort of reaching a decision that is behind the default effect, but some unconscious risk-aversion process that does not allow the mind to rest easily in the non-default case.

No way a lifetime is enough to explore the most meaningful possible thing in your life without picking it first. You have to choose without topic to introduce the decision making process, and importance seems a very very good way to prioritize, BUT only if you look at it as the «important for _me_» ones.

It's worth thinking about options for e.g. snacks but yes, better to schedule a few hours in a year/month/whatever to basically plan and explore rather than just some ad-hoc 'should I be doing this?' at every instance.

> The key is figuring out what matters and what doesn't (to you) and only thinking about what does

truth is nothing matters and everything matters.

Say you are a teenage girl, you see yourself in the mirror, you don't like your body, you think you're fat.

You see other "fat" girls on reddit that receive a lot of praise for displaying themselves half naked.

your looks are very important to you, you think about it constantly and it depresses you.

one day you post a picture on this reddit thing, your face is hidden, it's hard to recognize the place where it was take, but you wanna try'n see what happens.

it works, men (and some women) like your picture, they put a like on it, they compliment your looks, you now feel better about yourself.

so you post more and more of them, everyone more audacious than the one before.

now what's important to you is: how can I be more visible, more visibility = more self esteem!

you open on OF and now what's important is "how can I promote it?".

not long after what's important becomes: how can I make money out of it?

and now you're in trouble, because that's your job and you didn't even know you wanted it and are not sure if it's the right thing to do, but you do it anyway, once you set things in motion, inertia becomes a b*tch.

---

It's an hyperbole, I know, but it's the small things that start the engine.

If people only thought about what actually matters it would be: food, water, shelter.

If I never thought "is there another option?" when I was much younger about clubs to go to in my hometown, I would never have discovered the underground music scene lurking in the shadows that has then become a big part of my life and it's now so important to me.

And I was one who did not even cared so much about music and went straight to "the default choice" about it.

> E.g if you never buy unhealthy snacks, you'll never have unhealthy snacks at home,

1 - there's no such thing as healthy snacks (if we are talking about snacks the product and not "a small amount of food eaten between meals")

2 - it means that at one point you though "is there another option?" about snacks, because the default option is not healthy at all, especially in the US, proving that "It doesn’t have to be about big decisions"

I wrote that article. Thanks for those examples.

> it means that at one point you though "is there another option?" about snacks

Yes, that was my point in the article, though maybe not clear enough. This conversation has given me lots of ideas to improve it. Thank you!

Is this the porn version of "marijuana is a gateway drug and you'll end up a crackhead on the street if you take a single puff"?

Do you understand why that's unconvincing to most people?

> Is this the porn version of "marijuana is a gateway drug and you'll end up a crackhead on the street if you take a single puff"?

nobody pay you to smoke marijuana, if somebody did and paid you even more to end up being a crackhead, many more people would and your comparison would make more sense.

> Do you understand why that's unconvincing to most people?

false premise, wrong conclusion.

Right. I actually have the analysis paralysis problem in my life - too much time and stress spent on decisions / choices that are largely equivalent.

On the daily, yes. However, periodically it makes sense to evaluate and check in on any and all habits. If there's a problem, you create new ones. You can't have the cognitive overhead of decision-making for everything all the time, which is why we have to change course for our auto-pilot as needed. Even for those things that matter more, you're not really going to be constantly making decisions about them.

If I have two bad choices, I'll cast about for a third. ;-) But for choices between everything from "equally meh" to "equally awesome" I often flip a coin.

I do this because it removes my agency in the choice.

My conscious story about this is that this comes from attempting to undermine sunk cost and survivor bias; but it could also be an artifact arising from the fact that I don't tend to habituate as much as norms, and therefore I think about "default" decisions more than most people.

Anyway what I get out of this is "life is good" instead of "good choice you made"; "I'd never noticed this difference between these things (or the outcome) before"; or "I really don't like Y as much as X". It also nudges me to contemplate the "both" or "neither" options for a fleeting moment.

People comment on it, for instance strangers in restaurants; people at the grocery store; ordinary people who seem baffled that someone can live their life by flipping a coin.

To avoid the spectacle of a coin flip (also, I don't carry coins!), I do the geeky thing:

  - Take the first printed word I see
  - Sum the letters' ordinal positions ("ramen" == 18+1+13+5+14 == 51)
  - Calculate modulus X for one of X choices (51 mod 3 == 0)
  - Select option index Y, ordered visually, geographically, temporally, or alphabetically as appropriate, sometimes in reverse to be ornery (["alice", "bob", "eve"][0] == "alice")

And Alice is the winner.

...

If I'm with another person who also can't decide, I skip the first two steps by asking them for a random number between 1 and (a random two digit number).

Then I just tell them whatever my secret preference was all along, and we watch the good movie together happily.

Kidding about that last part. All movies suck.

The irony of the quoted Robert Frost poem

> Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

is that Frost's line is sarcastic. He wrote this poem about a friend that would endlessly analyze his choices, fretting about not choosing the optimal choice. He'd always be in decision paralysis. Frost was actually saying that either path would have been fine and you should just make a choice instead of wasting all your time overthinking it.

Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to. Alice: I don't much care where. The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go. Alice: ...So long as I get somewhere. The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.

Author of the article here. I did not know that – thank you for sharing. This makes the poem even better but definitely not the best choice for the article!

Since you're here, I wanted to ask if you've looked into military decision making. This may be anecdotal, but one can often see officers making split second choices with far reaching consequences without too much deliberation. Not sure if that's something that's specifically trained for or just a result of the uh, working conditions.

I'm actually in the process of interviewing my dad about that! He's an engineer and used to be sent to war zones to assess local military airport infrastructures. He was sometimes dropped there with a military unit just for a few days. There were time when they didn't all make it back.

I always thought there was a certain coldness to the way he was making decisions, but it all makes much more sense now that I know more about those past experiences. He seems to think it's the result of the working conditions. I have tons of notes and audio recordings which I want to clean up and publish at some point.

It's about a guy bragging about it later.

Some day ages and ages hence, I made an inconsequential choice, and THAT made all the different.

worth reading an explanation - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/89511/robert-frost...

I can look back at my life and see the times when I should have taken the non default option. I shouldn't have gone to uni, I should have chosen different subjects at college. However, it's easy to see that now, at the time it didn't seem like a choice.

So my takeaway from this kind of argument is to explain to my kids that they do have choices and they can make them, and it's not the end of the world if those were the riskier options that didn't turn out well. You can go back to education etc.

There are, of course, irreversible decisions. But when it comes to risk surely the greatest risk is getting old and thinking "dang, wish I'd done that when I was younger, now it's too hard / late and my life is that little bit more boring"

"Default" choices embed knowledge and wisdom in the selection process. The reason defaults tend to exist is to appeal as an easy, reliable, safe choice, probabilistically speaking ignoring any specific contextual circumstance.

We like defaults with the option to deviate because humans tend to be more alike than we are different and are aware of this fact. Given a lack of knowledge and information around a choice, we gravitate to what we think are our peers choices. We also tend to realize while we're very alike, we do have differences from others and while small, it's important to be able to exercise and customize around those differences. Context may become important, we may grow wiser to make a more informed decision for ourselves and so on. This is why we like the option.

Until I'm knowledgable, show me what others choose, give me expert informed knowledge, or have someone knowledgable interpret the context for me but don't constrain me to these because I will grow, I will eventually understand these things, and I will want the freedom to deviate as needed. Maybe I won't need to deviate, but I don't know that yet.

I find the best way to overcome this bias, and it's not mentioned in this article, is to put myself in the reverse situation: if the alternative option I'm pondering had always been the default, would I switch to the current option?

I think like most generalizations, "studies show" is making this seem like a much more pervasive bias than it is. I definitely buy that the majority of people tend to go with defaults more often than not, because were that not the case, the notion of a "default" would hardly even be well-formed. But it's clear that it's also not that uncommon to have the opposite bias, as demonstrated by how often one hears the advice "don't reinvent the wheel" and how apt and wise that advice is for some people

I definitely find myself in that position. I have a strong resistance to uncritically making decisions based on the default that is presented to me, and while I do view this as a valuable part of my mindset in many circumstances, it also is quite often the wrong call in retrospect, whether it's absorbing too much risk, accepting too much decision fatigue over insignificant choices, or even choosing suboptimally just to make a point

I think a lot of people could benefit from trying to make more choices, but I've very seldom met advice whose opposite wasn't appropriate for someone, and even less often met advice that's wise for everyone in every circumstance

Too often, studies that find that e.g. 67% of their participants behave a certain way - often in fairly constructed conditions - create a false sense of consensus and homogeneity, even among fairly smart consumers of such information, when reported this way

But isn't "don't reinvent the wheel" also sort of a default effect? We also call it the "not invented here" syndrome. Which shows that the user "defaults" to use the things he already knows instead of going out and find that (unknown to him) standard.

Missing from the article is the benefit of choosing the default. We make thousands of decisions per day, and being good at not thinking about them drastically reduces stress.

> Many studies show that we tend to generally accept the default option—the one that was preselected for us—and that making an option a default increases the likelihood that such an option is chosen.

Personally, I find this makes sense in a society of (some) trust. My default options are derived from previous experiences. I have tried all those different snacks between meetings, found them to be lacking, and now set this one to be the default.

I think I choose default choice in contexts where I have a some trust in where the default setting came from.

I trust my favorite restaurant's "today's special", the default option. They have not steered me wrong. I trust my dentist to use the default periodic procedures.

So, to me default is not just blind acceptance, but specific and contextual trust either from previous experiences of mine or with the decision makers' previous decisions.

The less travelled road generally carries a lot more risk.

With software, it's less tested so you're more likely to encounter a bug. With a physical road, more likely to encounter potholes or other dangers.

You clearly don't live in Los Angeles.

Given the title I was very surprised to not have decision fatigue mentionend even once. Decision fatigue is the well studied and obvious answer to why we don't like to choose ALL THE TIME.

worth pointing out that there was significant controversy around decision fatigue as part of the psychology replication crisis a few years back. I'm not an expert so I don't know what the outcome of that was or where the field stands today on it, but it may be that that is why it wasn't mentioned

Not always but often, when faced with two paths, one hard and one obviously harder, my "mindset" kicks in and I pick the harder. Because fuck it.

On deeper reflection, when I'm making those kind of choices, out mountain-biking or yomping, they happen very rapidly and come from a more direct place. My soul is demanding challenge. There's no fatigue. It's not carelessness, just caution taking a back seat and reading the map while I drive.

On the other hand, stuck between the choices of which two fine drinks to order.... comfort kills.

> Not always but often, when faced with two paths, one hard and one obviously harder, my "mindset" kicks in and I pick the harder. Because fuck it.

Hah same here, though I've been trying to move past that and make life less bloody difficult for myself.

For some life choices, starting over might seem daunting for a reason. To embark on certain journeys might require resources that we do not have (mental, physical and health resources).

It's simple: being able to choose is great in the cases when you have preferences but having to make to choose when you don't prefer any option over another (or when the option you prefer comes with some negative aspects like a moral burden, compensating the preferability) is a pain.

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