Introduction

Water flows downhill. General Ulysses S. Grant knew this when he attempted to divert the Mississippi River to bypass hostile forces during the American Civil War [1]. While the project eventually failed due to technical problems, the idea behind Grant’s plan was sound. Water always follows the path of least resistance. If a new path of even less resistance is introduced, the water will naturally divert in that direction. This principle largely applies to people as well. Humans tend to use the means that requires the least effort to get to a desired ends. Thus, as new systems and environments are set up, the creators must face a question of ethics about determining what will be the path of least resistance and consequently, the default behavior.

Toggles and Switches

For the purposes of this paper, a default setting is the most likely outcome of a situation as dictated by the context and environment. This applies to many areas of life, but is perhaps the most straightforward in consumer technology.

If you have a smartphone or computer, think back to the last time you opened the settings application to do anything except connect to WiFi or a Bluetooth device. For most people, it has probably been over a year or even not since the device was purchased. Inside the settings application, there exists a myriad of switches and drop down menus which dictate the behavior of the device and, by proxy, the behavior of the user. When the device is purchased, all of those toggles need to be set somehow. A switch is either on or off. Because the majority of people will leave those settings how they were upon purchase, an ethical responsibility is placed on the makers of that device to have the default settings be fair and beneficial to the majority of users.

The iPhone has a feature in the settings called “Do Not Disturb While Driving.” This puts the phone into a mode where very few, if any, notifications will come through the phone while the user is driving to reduce distractions [2]. In the settings, this feature has three options for activation: Automatically, When Connected to Car Bluetooth, and Manually. If set to “Automatically,” this feature will turn on when it detects the phone moving above a certain speed. This brings us to the ethical question: Which option should “Do Not Disturb While Driving” be set to by default? In this case, it seems fairly straightforward. The default should be “Automatically” because it would potentially reduce car accidents related to distracted driving.

But the decisions for certain defaults aren’t always so clear cut. Should data roaming be on or off? Should autocorrect be activated or not? Should the camera shutter sound be on or off? What should be the default ringtone? Some of these decisions might as well be left to chance, but there are some where the interests of the user and the creator come into conflict. A commonly encountered example of this is in online commerce.

An illustrative hypothetical: You are in the process of signing up for a service or purchasing a product from an online store. Just before you finish entering your payment information, you notice a checkbox that says something to this effect: “Keep me informed about future developments with this product/service.” This usually means signing you up for their newsletter which may not have a straightforward unsubscribing process. Many customers would likely find this annoying. The interest of having their inbox free of clutter is in conflict with the company’s interest of promoting their product or service. It can be very easy to click through a payment form too quickly to notice whether you have inadvertently signed up for promotional material you probably don’t have much interest in receiving. Every business that has one of those checkboxes on their website has an ethical decision to make when programming their commerce platform: Should that box be checked when that page loads?

Market Forces and Couch Placement

Looking beyond technology, the defaults become more subtle and difficult to identify. There also exists an element of deniability as the defaults aren’t necessarily the result of an active decision on the part of the creator. Whether it is a store manager deciding what brands to stock or a homeowner deciding how to arrange furniture, the defaults created could be the result of anything from a series of coin flips to intentional and calculated design.

Consider the supermarket. When buying orange juice, there are usually a few different options of varying price and quality. For each particular store, there will be a default brand of orange juice for each customer demographic. This is determined by elements like price, branding, and physical arrangement of the shelves. Whether the default was chosen implicitly or explicitly by the store’s management is arguable, but the fact remains that a default exists. Again, this places a matter of ethics on whoever determined the default regardless of intent. Maybe the default brand has the highest profit margin for the store but is also significantly less nutritious than the others. That would be another example of when a conflict of interest exists between the consumer and the provider.

Some may object to the placement of responsibility on the creators and distributors of goods and services, insisting consumers become better informed about the products they buy. While it would likely make for a much healthier and productive society, the fact remains that individuals exist who will never put in the effort required to become an informed consumer. Instead of wishing upon a star for people to make better decisions, it is far more practical to focus on the systems in which people interact and the default behavior those systems create.

Another illustrative hypothetical: A brand new homeowner is in the process of moving in to their house. When deciding how to arrange the furniture in the living room, the homeowner needs to consider what the room will be used to do. If they are anticipating having guests over on a regular basis, the way the living room is organized can have significant effects on how the guests interact. Having every seat directly face a TV would create the default of watching whatever is on the screen. But if the seats face towards the center of the room, the default might be tipped towards in-depth conversation. The behavior of a group is influenced by the specific facets of the environments in which they live and operate.

Taking it Personally

Perhaps the most familiar, yet often the most neglected, area of defaults are habits of personal behavior. These are the actions we take in situations encountered often, maybe even several times a day. It is understandable why these behaviors are often neglected. Habits are notoriously hard to break.

Allowing for a loose metaphor, the human brain is like a large field of tall grass with many solitary trees scattered about in various locations. Having the thought to execute an action is like walking from one tree to another. When walking between two certain trees, it may be very difficult to navigate until you have made the journey several times and have started to mat down the grass. Just as a path through that field becomes more defined the more often it is traversed, a neural path in your brain becomes easier to activate the more often that specific thought pattern is followed [3]. When encountering a familiar situation, your brain is more likely to follow that path of least resistance which has been created through consistent use than to blaze a new trail. This choice of paths usually happens unconsciously, so we often create our own default behaviors without realizing.

Because the environment in which a person spends the majority of their time determines the majority of their personal default behaviors, every individual faces an ethical dilemma when deciding how to arrange and populate their personal space. Making changes to that environment can be much more effective to change habits than the force of will alone.

Say you had the habit of eating a bowl of ice cream every night and wanted to change this behavior for health reasons. When deciding on a snack, ice cream is the default option because it is delicious and available. It is unlikely that anything could be done to decrease your enjoyment of ice cream, but you could change your personal environment to make access more difficult. You can’t eat ice cream if there is none in your freezer. Populate your kitchen with more nutritious snacks that require little to no preparation. If you make it easy to choose a new behavior over an old one, you will likely be able to make a lasting difference. Like General Grant diverting the Mississippi, if a path of less resistance can be introduced which subverts a habit which you would like to change, the transition process will not be as much of an uphill battle.

Conclusion

The default option for any situation is far more likely to occur than anything else. What the default option turns out to be is determined by the context and environment in which the decision is made. Whether it’s the system preferences on a smartphone, the brands of orange juice stocked at a supermarket, or your choice of a bedtime snack, the most likely outcome of a situation is determined by those that created the environment. Therefore, those creators have an ethical responsibility to decide on an appropriate default action.

References

[1] “Grant’s Canal.” National Park Service, 14 April 2015. Web Link.

[2] “How to use the Do Not Disturb while driving feature.” Apple, 21 May 2018. Web Link.

[3] Sarah L. Friedman, Kenneth A. Klivington, Rita W. Peterson, “The Brain, Cognition, and Education.” Academic Press, Sep 25, 2013. Web Link.