Social Influence Failure: The Case of Default Neglect

Dominant theories in the behavioral sciences suggest that people understand how to exploit common biases to influence others. However, these predictions have received little empirical attention. We consider a widely-studied bias with special policy relevance, the default effect, which is the tendency to choose whichever option is the status quo. We investigated whether people are good at using defaults to influence others’ choices. We asked managers, law/business/medical students, and U.S. adults to nudge others toward selecting a target option by choosing whether to present a target option or a non-target option as the default. In contrast to theoretical predictions and expert predictions, only 50.8% of participants set the target option as the default (Studies 1-4), consistent with people not using defaults at all. This default neglect appears to be driven by incorrect beliefs and bounded awareness, and has important implications for decision making, social influence, and evidence-based policy.