Despite being the worst book about behaviour change ever written, Nudge has a point: people tend to pick the default option. If the default option is a plain digestive and you have to work a little harder to get a chocolate digestive, chances are, you’ll stick with the plain digestive. It’s still a digestive, after all. By manipulating the default option, one can manipulate behaviour. If one wanted to stop people eating biscuits at all, the default option would be a dry hunk of Ryvita, with hoop-jumping required for digestives, plain or chocolate. Fewer people would eat biscuits.
We are bombarded with default options. Everywhere we look, we do things without thinking.
Businesses know this, and have been capitalising on this tendency of ours. Open up a phone book. Count the number of companies with names such as “A1 Cabs, ABC Cabs, Aardvark Cabs”; the ones that you will call before you ever bother reading down. Consider how shelves are stacked, with the cheap goods at the bottom so the eye is drawn to the identical, yet dearer, products placed at eye level. Think about the last time you went to a supermarket? Did you buy the special offer chocolate near the till, just because it was there?
Not everything comes so naturally and so easily. Sometimes it needs some marketing to point out a problem people never knew existed in order to sell products: many beauty products are targeting ugliness that did not exist before an advertising executive had a smart idea. Removing most body hair has now become default and automatic for women. Make-up is sold as something which does not look like one is wearing any make-up at all. It is, after all, normal and natural for women to wear make-up, so they should paint their faces to make it appear as though they are wearing none at all.
Most of us swallow this without ever really thinking about it.
We then convince ourselves that we made the right choice, and that we consciously chose the product we did.
What it is, is control. We will unthinkingly purchase products not because they are better, but because they’re there and everyone else is doing it. There is not a readily visible alternative, and our big brains are used to taking shortcuts to get things done.
A lot of what we do is based on this. Take monogamy.
There is absolutely no good reason for monogamous relationships to be the only way to have a romantic relationship or to raise a family. None whatsoever.
Yet monogamy is the default. It is taken as a given that relationships should and must contain two people: no more, no less. It is visible in formal forms: always “partner”, never “partner (s)”. It is visible in invitations: “bring a plus one”. It is visible on Valentine’s Day: a restaurant with orderly tables for two set out.
Unthinkingly, we accept monogomy to be normal and natural. Everyone else is doing it. To reinforce this supposedly natural default, a little intervention is undertaken: the institution of marriage. Here, the state validates what it perceives as appropriate ways to love. In the UK, marriage is only available to a couple consisting of a man and a woman. It is not even open to monogamous same-sex couples, who receive a similar but different state-sanctioned seal of approval on their relationship.
Many people claim to have consciously chosen monogamy. When it is presented as the norm, as the default option, how is that a choice at all?
It is a conscious choice in the same way that the slightly pricier, equally inferior noodles you chose to buy was a conscious choice. Everyone else does it, it’s right there, it is sanctioned by external forces who do not present alternative options.
The default is as normal and natural as any other choice. Think. Beware the nudges.
Another angry woman 
Great post.
I find being single is my default option though!
Ooh! That’s another instance of default optioning there–it’s really coded into communication that one is either “single” or “taken”, when in fact there’s a rainbow of grey areas (admittedly, a very grey rainbow).
I was once in what was functionally, to all intents and purposes, a monogamous relationship, and I continued to use the label “single” throughout, as I didn’t want my identity as an independent person to be superseded by a large-chinned twat who I was shagging and going on dates with when my friends weren’t looking :p
Anyway, what I think I’m saying here is that:
A. “Single” isn’t a very helpful label; and
B. It buys into the default optioning a bit.
I know what you mean. It’s hard to change our perceptions and language but we should try!
I think the alternative to monogamy includes things other than three or more seats at the table 🙂 Sometimes, you don’t want to have a threesome. Dyads are purportedly stable, yet are still subject to instability; triads have multiplied points of potential conflict, and so on. My polyamory is usually not simultaneous…
“When it is presented as the norm, as the default option, how is that a choice at all?
It is a conscious choice in the same way that the slightly pricier, equally inferior noodles you chose to buy was a conscious choice. Everyone else does it, it’s right there, it is sanctioned by external forces who do not present alternative options.”
Some people prefer their digestives without chocolate.
Is their any moral justification for telling them that they are not choosing?
Worrying when advocates of the freedom to choose chocololate end up disdaining those who prefer their digestives plain. If you’re a relationship anarchist, you should let people choose their preferred setup, and I might even suggest that it makes sense to let them decide whether to be happy to accept external condition x or y, if they are OK with it.
None of this stops you expressing your own personal tastes, or talking about them.
Part of the problem of multiples strands of freedoms is that on some level, most people, however mentally disciplined, tend to end up believing that people are *really* free to choose something when it means choosing like them.
I identify as monogomous in the sense that I am often drawn to one person. This is not to say that I would never enter any open relationship, but I would never classify myself as poly, and that’s my choice, default or not. By the same token I also recognise that even open relationships come with extra difficulties – handling jealouses, sharing time, reciprocity, trust over issues like sexual health, personal posessions or finances.
The state has no place in bedrooms. Equally, rather resent anyone telling me that valuing the plain-ness of my digestive is somehow a ‘wrong choice’. I like my biscuit and I don’t really care about anyone elses.