Title: Set It and Forget It: How Default Settings Rule the World
Context: Don’t like your current user experience? You could change it. Or continue to suffer. Totally your call.
Synopsis: Nobody changes their default settings. On anything. Ever. Software, appliances, electronic devices, who has the time to muck around in the guts of some preference menu to try and make one little thing marginally better? Sure, on aggregate, lots of little things getting marginally better could have a huge improvement on our overall experience but we rarely encounter these minor inconveniences simultaneously, a horrifying thought that if it actually happened would surely be enough to send us scrambling for the user settings. Instead we plod on, usually wholly ignorant of the fact that we are operating under the dictate of some unknown puppet master who has predestined us to a life of incremental misery. As wrong as this seems — and it seems hella wrong — it often comes down to a cost benefit trade-off between a little bit of pain in the subjugation of an ill-fitting predetermined behavior and an equally minuscule inconvenience in rooting out the issue and twisting a few knobs to make it go away. Our tolerance for psychic pain and manifest laziness locked in a death spiral. We have no one to blame but ourselves, even when it really is someone else’s fault.
Best Bit: “They might not seem like much, but defaults (and their designers) hold immense power – they make decisions for us that we’re not even aware of making.”
via propublica.org
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