Rady School of Management, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0553, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2021 Apr;28(2):695-702. doi: 10.3758/s13423-020-01834-4. Epub 2020 Nov 2.
While past research has demonstrated the power of defaults to nudge decision makers toward desired outcomes, few studies have examined whether people understand how to strategically set defaults to influence others' choices. A recent paper (Zlatev et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114, 13643-13648, 2017) found that participants exhibited "default neglect," or the failure to set optimal defaults at better than chance levels. However, we show that this poor performance is specific to the complex and potentially confusing paradigms they used, and does not reflect a general lack of understanding regarding defaults. Using simple scenarios, Experiments 1A and 1B provide clear evidence that people can optimally set defaults given their goals. In Experiment 2, we conducted a direct and conceptual replication of one of Zlatev et al.'s original studies, which found that participants selected the optimal default significantly less than chance. While our direct replication found results similar to those in the original study, our conceptual replication, which simplified the task, instead found the opposite. Experiment 3 manipulated the framing of the option attributes, which were confounded with the default in the original study, and found that the original framing led to below-chance performance while the alternate framing led to above-chance performance. Together, our results cast doubt on the prevalence and generalizability of default neglect, and instead suggest that people are capable of setting optimal defaults in attempts at social influence.
虽然过去的研究已经证明了默认设置在引导决策者做出期望结果方面的强大作用，但很少有研究探讨人们是否理解如何通过策略性地设置默认设置来影响他人的选择。最近的一篇论文（Zlatev 等人，《美国国家科学院院刊》，114，13643-13648，2017）发现，参与者表现出“默认忽视”，即在设定最优默认设置时，表现不如随机水平。然而，我们表明，这种较差的表现是特定于他们使用的复杂且可能令人困惑的范式的，并不反映人们对默认设置的普遍缺乏理解。通过简单的情景，实验 1A 和 1B 提供了明确的证据，表明人们可以根据自己的目标来最优地设置默认设置。在实验 2 中，我们对 Zlatev 等人的一项原始研究进行了直接和概念上的复制，该研究发现参与者选择最优默认设置的次数明显低于随机水平。虽然我们的直接复制发现的结果与原始研究相似，但我们的概念复制，简化了任务，反而发现了相反的结果。实验 3 操纵了选项属性的框架，这些框架在原始研究中与默认设置混淆在一起，结果发现原始框架导致低于平均水平的表现，而替代框架导致高于平均水平的表现。总的来说，我们的研究结果对默认忽视的普遍性和可推广性提出了质疑，而是表明人们有能力在试图进行社会影响时设置最优的默认设置。
