Default Effect
The tendency to keep the option that is already in place.
What it is
Brigitte Madrian and Dennis Shea found in 2001 that retirement plan participation was much higher under automatic enrolment and that many employees kept the default contribution rate and fund; they attribute this to inertia and to reading the default as advice. On this site it is read alongside Choice Architecture, Brand Identity Guidelines and Status Quo Bias.
In effect
Used in a guidelines article to argue for a default logo file, typeface and template for every element.
What it does not say
It is not the same thing as Choice Architecture, which sits close to it on this site but describes a different part of how people decide. It also does not say that the finding reaches every product, buyer or setting; where this page goes beyond the cited research, the step is an inference and is labelled as one.
Sources
- Behavioural economist whose work on retirement saving established the default effect on administrative data rather than in a laboratory.
- Co-author of the 2001 study of one company's switch to automatic enrolment in its pension scheme, which remains the cleanest evidence for the default effect because it rests on administrative records of an entire workforce before and after a policy change.