Hi friends,
Did you know that Google pays Apple over $10B a year to remain the default search engine on iOS? To uderstand why, let’s talk about the default effect.
The below chart shows the organ donation consseveralr a number of countries in Europe. What’s striking is that countries that one would imagine are fairly similar such as Denmark and Sweden have large differences in consent rates.
What might explain these differences?
In countries such as Denmark and Netherlands, organ donation consent is “opt-in”, meaning people have to fill in a form and check a box to choose to donate their organs. In countries such as Austria and Sweden, organ donation consent is presumed. People who don’t want to donate their organs have to essentially fill out a form to “opt out”, meaning by default people consent to donate their organs.
The large difference in organ consent rates is essentially caused by a difference in defaults in the two sets of countries and illustrates the default effect.
The default effect is the phenomenon where making an option the default among a set of choices increases the likelihood of it being chosen.
Now if you’re getting worried about your free will, fret noseverale a number of reasons for the default effect — some of which are quite rational.
Choosing something that isn’t the default requires some effort. And we all know that people are generally lazy and don’t want to put in the effort.
The effort required could vary from a lot (such as having to fill out a form and mailing it in to change something) to almost nothing (such as changing something from the default option on a dropdown while filling out a form online).
In general, “laziness” aside, it is rational for a user to stick with the default if the incremental benefit from switching is less than the effort required to do so.
An area where this plays out is default apps on phones. For example, Google Maps is widely regarded as being better than Apple Maps on iOS, but Apple Maps comes pre-installed on iOS and is the default. Unsurprisingly, it was used almost 3x as often as Google Maps¹ on the iPhone over a year after launch.
One thing to note is that when it initially launched, Apple Maps was so bad that many users felt the need to install Google Maps. As it has continued to improve, even though Google Maps might still be better since the gap has narrowed, the “cost” to switch is about the same as it was before, it makes sense for fewer new iOS users to make that switch because the cost is the same but the benefit from the switch is less for them, so one can imagine over time, less and less new iPhone users will feel the need to download Google Maps.
Often the default (especially if the person with a choice trusts the intermediary providing the options) is viewed as the recommended option. In such a situation, switching away from the option might be deemed risky, in that the person making a decision might feel that they aren’t considering some factors that the knowledgeable party made when setting the default.
This factor tends to be particularly important when people decide between choices that they aren’t very familiar with or are complex or when the party presenting the choices is trustworthy.