{"id":689,"date":"2008-04-20T23:25:03","date_gmt":"2008-04-21T03:25:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2008\/04\/20\/defaults\/"},"modified":"2008-04-20T23:25:03","modified_gmt":"2008-04-21T03:25:03","slug":"defaults","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2008\/04\/20\/defaults\/","title":{"rendered":"Defaults"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fast Company has an interesting article<\/a> talking about how the human race seems destined for laziness. Presented two choices, one the “default” (as in, it’ll happen if they don’t do anything), the other being far superior but requiring that they do something, most take the inferior default.<\/p>\n

The main example is the “Save More Tomorrow,” where, in essence, most of your “raise” will be socked away into your 401(k) program, unless you request that your employer give you the money. (I assume there’s a lot more going on than them simply failing to give you your money.)<\/p>\n

But he presents some other interesting statistics. Organ donors, for example. His example is Germany, but it’s the same deal here: you have to opt-in to being an organ donor. In Germany, 12% of people are organ donors.<\/p>\n

Austria requires that you opt out<\/em> of being an organ donor. What’s their donation rate? You could argue that it’d be close to 12%: for such a big decision, surely 88% of people don’t want to be organ donors. You could also take the other side of the coin: 88% of people were too lazy to check the box, so 88% of people would be organ donors.<\/p>\n

But it’s a two-variable problem. In Germany (and the U.S.), the 12% is people who were willing to donate AND who cared to check the box. In Austria, you need the people who don’t want to donate AND who cared to check the box.<\/p>\n

For this reason, 99% of Austrians are organ donors. Only 1% opposed being an organ donor AND took the time to opt out.<\/p>\n

It’s interesting, then, to apply this to computer interfaces. How many sites, when you register, have “Sign me up for lots of spam!” checked by default? It always annoys me, but I bet they get a lot of people that way. They’re not militantly anti-spam, so they lazily leave the box checked.<\/p>\n

When you leave a comment right now<\/em>, please tell me what you think!<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fast Company has an interesting article talking about how the human race seems destined for laziness. Presented two choices, one the “default” (as in, it’ll happen if they don’t do anything), the other being far superior but requiring that they … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,10,12,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-cool-links","category-ideas","category-interesting","category-rants-raves"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}