The Architecture of Choice

The idea in plain words

A cafeteria puts fruit at eye level and cake at the back, and people eat more fruit. A company enrols employees in its pension scheme automatically, letting them opt out, and almost everyone saves. A video service starts the next episode unless you stop it, and people watch more. In none of these cases is anyone forbidden anything. The arrangement of the choice does the work.

There is no neutral way to arrange choices. Something must come first, something must be the default, some option must take fewer steps. Whoever designs those things is a choice architect, and their design influences what people choose.

Where it comes from

Economists had long assumed that defaults should not matter to rational people. Evidence said otherwise. In 2001 Brigitte Madrian and Dennis Shea studied a company that switched its retirement savings plan from opt-in to automatic enrolment; participation among new employees rose from under half to well over four in five. In 2003 Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein showed that organ donation consent rates differed enormously between countries with opt-in and opt-out systems.

In Nudge (2008) the economist Richard Thaler and the legal scholar Cass Sunstein generalised these findings. They argued that choice architects cannot avoid influencing people and should do so in ways that help people make choices they would endorse, while preserving freedom to choose otherwise, a position they called libertarian paternalism. Thaler received the Nobel Prize in economics in 2017.

What it does to the mind

Defaults work through inertia, the effort of changing; through implied endorsement, the sense that the default is what experts recommend; and through loss aversion, since departing from a default can feel like giving something up. Order works because attention is limited and the first options are considered most. Effort works because every additional step loses some people. None of these require people to be foolish; they are reasonable shortcuts in a world of too many decisions.

Where it shows up

The essay on recommendation feeds describes autoplay and the infinite feed as defaults designed for engagement. The essay on payments describes one-tap payment removing the pause in which people reconsider. The essay on subscription software describes automatic renewal and cancellation made difficult, and the regulators who intervened. The essay on app stores describes warning screens designed to discourage alternatives.

What it asks of someone deciding

Design defaults for the outcome you would defend in public, because most people will accept them.

Make the choice that serves the customer at least as easy as the one that serves you. Asymmetry of effort is where nudges become traps.

Test the design by explaining it. If you would be embarrassed to tell people how and why you steered them, change the design.