고등학교 영어Ⅱ (NE능률 오선영) 연계 글

Many forms we fill out, from phone contracts to online surveys, arrive with some answers already chosen. Such a preset option is called the default, and it stays in effect unless a person takes the trouble to change it. Because changing it takes a moment of attention, the easiest path for most people is not to change it but to leave it alone. As a result, whichever option is marked in advance often decides the outcome for a surprisingly large number of people.

In 2003, Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein, two decision researchers at Columbia University, examined this effect in a choice about organ donation. Some European countries counted people as donors only if they signed up, while others counted them as donors unless they asked to be left off the donor list. When the researchers compared the share of people counted as donors, every sign-up country fell far below every country of the second type, with a gap of nearly sixty percentage points between the two groups. In an online experiment, they also found that whichever answer came already selected was the one most participants kept, even though a single click could change that answer.

A 2001 study by Brigitte Madrian and Dennis Shea found a similar effect at a large American company. Before the company changed its retirement plan, employees had to fill out a form or make a phone call to join it. Afterward, new employees were enrolled automatically, so those who preferred not to save in the plan but to take home their full pay had to ask to leave. Though the plan's benefits were unchanged, participation among new employees more than doubled. Many of them also kept both the default saving rate of 3 percent and the default fund, a combination few earlier employees had chosen.

Accepting a default takes no effort, and giving up the current option can feel like a loss. Many people also read a default as a quiet recommendation from whoever designed the choice. Yet every policy must say what happens when people make no decision, so some default always exists. The task for designers, then, is not to avoid defaults but to choose them with care. A default can err in two directions, as Johnson and Goldstein noted: it may miss willing donors or list unwilling ones. Whichever option a designer sets as the default will be kept by many people who never compare the alternatives, so the designer shares responsibility for the outcome.