How to Make Smarter Decisions by Designing Your Defaults

Do you want to make smarter decisions everyday day? You can. All you need to do is harness the power of defaults.

90% of your daily decisions happen automatically, many shaped by environment. Thus, most decisions are a habit, not a deliberate choice.

And habits can be developed by shaping the invisible defaults of your life. To make smarter choices, design smarter defaults.

Is your phone charging next to your bed while you sleep?

It’s the first object you touch immediately after waking up. A ton of notifications await. Checking social media and email easily becomes a habit as soon as you wake up. And after at least a couple of minutes of infinite scrolling, you get up.

What if, instead of your phone, you place a water bottle next to your bed? For a while, you would feel something is missing. But soon enough drinking water becomes the first habit of the day.

Once you remove the phone from the picture, suddenly a good habit — drinking water after waking up — becomes easy to perform.

And that is the power of defaults.

The Power of Defaults

Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein conducted a study that revealed just how much your environment impacts your behavior — often without you even realizing it.

This graph shows the percentage of people, across different European countries, who are willing to donate their organs after they pass away:

In a continent where countries are very much alike, what could cause such a difference? Initially, the researchers thought the difference in donations would be caused by the “big” reasons, such as religion and culture. But that wasn’t the case.

For example, Austria and Germany are located right next to one another, sharing geographic, cultural, and social similarities. It would make sense that their donation rates would be roughly the same. And yet, only 12% of the population in Germany has chosen to become an organ donor while almost all of the Austrians (99.98%!) have chosen to donate.

Could the researchers explain that massive gap between similar countries with a single factor?

Do Defaults Save Lives?

They focused on measuring the change in organ donations by focusing on a single factor: the no-action default for agreement.

In organ donation, countries use one of two possible policies: