Freedom and Active Choice

Freedom and Active Choice

Some freedom-loving critics have another arrow in their quiver, one for which we have more sympathy. They are concerned about liberty and free choice rather than welfare (which they are skeptical we can measure or assess). For this reason, they strongly prefer active choosing to well-designed defaults. At most, they would like to provide people with the information necessary to make an informed choice, and then tell people to choose for themselves. This way of thinking was reflected in that campaign by the Swedish government to get citizens to choose their own investment portfolios, and as we have seen, it is a strategy that has some downsides.

Active choosing is a form of choice architecture, and people can be nudged to make active choices. We agree that sometimes that’s an excellent idea. But should people be required to choose? Generally? Always? We think that required active choosing is most suitable when the choices are simple, such as whether to opt in or out. In more complex situations, such as choosing a portfolio from a menu of hundreds of mutual funds, forcing people to choose is a dubious strategy. It’s also pretty paternalistic. Why not provide a well-designed default and then offer people the freedom to pick something else? Often people choose not to choose, and we should respect their choice. We have seen that Swedes who have entered the labor market in the past decade are overwhelmingly declining the option of becoming their own portfolio manager. We don’t expect people to be their own physicians; why should we require them to make other complex decisions if there are trusted experts who can do it better, and on whom they freely choose to rely? And yes, we know (and have said) that neither trusted nor expert are adjectives that can be presumed when it comes to advice givers.

In the context of organ donations, we do advocate something close to the active choice model. We prefer prompted choice to required choice because people can react badly to being told they must answer some question, but we also find the notion of presuming someone’s consent in this domain to be overreach.

In addition to being an intrusion on freedom, required choice is simply impractical in many environments. Do you want to choose all the ingredients in your restaurant meals? If you buy a new car, don’t you want the manufacturer to set the default for the headlights to be on when it is dark and off when it is light? If instead you insist on turning the lights on and off manually (more freedom!), there is a very good chance you will leave the lights on (draining the battery) if you leave for work when it is still dark but arrive when it is light. There are hundreds of such settings. Is it better for buyers to spend the first hour in their new car choosing the best setting for the brightness of the display? We think well-chosen defaults work well in this setting, and they could be improved by a salient tutorial on how to adjust the seat and mirrors since, especially for those settings, one size certainly does not fit all.

Active choosing is often a good idea, but in many domains, curation and well-designed defaults are a blessing. We should not wish them away.