Recently, defaults have become celebrated as a low-cost and easy-to-implement nudge for promoting positive outcomes, both at an individual and societal level. In the present research, we conducted a large-scale field experiment (N = 32,508) in an educational context to test the effectiveness of a default intervention in promoting participation in a potentially beneficial achievement test. We found that a default manipulation increased the rate at which high school students registered to take the test but failed to produce a significant change in students’ actual rate of test-taking. These results join past literature documenting robust effects of default framings on initial choice but marked variability in the extent to which those choices ultimately translate to real-world outcomes. We suggest that this variability is attributable to differences in choice-to-outcome pathways – the extent to which the initial choice is causally determinative of the outcome.

Corresponding author: David A. Kalkstein, email: dave.kalkstein@gmail.com

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.

Kalkstein, D., De Lima, F., Brady, S., Rozek, C., Johnson, E., & Walton, G. (2022). Defaults are not a panacea: Distinguishing between default effects on choices and on outcomes. Behavioural Public Policy, 1-16. doi:10.1017/bpp.2022.24

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioural-public-policy/article/defaults-are-not-a-panacea-distinguishing-between-default-effects-on-choices-and-on-outcomes/A9CDEBE021D23C750E14F58C03D2DD83