Sally Helgesen [Archive.org URL]

The design of defaults is thus of great importance. And that importance is only magnified by the flawed nature of human decision making. Although lawmakers, economists, and providers of healthcare and social services used to assume that people based decisions on their own rational self-interest, seven decades of behavioral data have demonstrated that this is rarely true. In reality, people are influenced by random factors and tend to base even consequential choices on convenience and habit. Moreover, the structures that frame how we make individual decisions always exist in a larger context. […] Yet the question of who gets to set the defaults sparks contentious debate.

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