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By Root 1039 0

surprise you to learn, however, how much cross-national variation there is. In a study conducted a few years ago, two psychologists, Eric Johnson and Dan Goldstein, found that rates at which citizens consented to donate their organs varied across different European countries, from as low as 4.25 percent to as high as 99.98 percent. What was even more striking about these differences is that they weren’t scattered all over the spectrum, but rather were clustered into two distinct groups—one group that had organ-donation rates in the single digits and teens, and one group that had rates in the high nineties—with almost nothing in between.1

What could explain such a huge difference? That’s the question I put to a classroom of bright Columbia undergraduates not long after the study was published. Actually, what I asked them to consider was two anonymous countries, A and B. In country A, roughly 12 percent of citizens agree to be organ donors, while in country B 99.9 percent do. So what did they think was different about these two countries that could account for the choices of their citizens? Being smart and creative students, they came up with lots of possibilities. Perhaps one country was secular while the other was highly religious. Perhaps one had more advanced medical care, and better success rates at organ transplants, than the other. Perhaps the rate of accidental death was higher in one than another, resulting in more available organs. Or perhaps one had a highly socialist culture, emphasizing the importance of community, while the other prized the rights of individuals.

All were good explanations. But then came the curveball. Country A was in fact Germany, and country B was … Austria. My poor students were stumped—what on earth could be so different about Germany and Austria? But they weren’t giving up yet. Maybe there was some difference in the legal or education systems that they didn’t know about? Or perhaps there had been some important event or media campaign in Austria that had galvanized support for organ donation. Was it something to do with World War II? Or maybe Austrians and Germans are more different than they seem. My students didn’t know what the reason for the difference was, but they were sure it was something big—you don’t see extreme differences like that by accident. Well, no—but you can get differences like that for reasons that you’d never expect. And for all their creativity, my students never pegged the real reason, which is actually absurdly simple: In Austria, the default choice is to be an organ donor, whereas in Germany the default is not to be. The difference in policies seems trivial—it’s just the difference between having to mail in a simple form and not having to—but it’s enough to push the donor rate from 12 percent to 99.9 percent. And what was true for Austria and Germany was true across all of Europe—all the countries with very high rates of organ donation had opt-out policies, while the countries with low rates were all opt-in.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

Understanding the influence of default settings on the choices we make is important, because our beliefs about what people choose and why they choose it affect virtually all our explanations of social, economic, and political outcomes. Read the op-ed section of any newspaper, watch any pundit on TV, or listen to any late-night talk radio, and you will be bombarded with theories of why we choose this over that. And although we often decry these experts, the broader truth is that all of us—from politicians and bureaucrats, to newspaper columnists, to corporate executives and ordinary citizens—are equally willing to espouse our own theory of human choice. Indeed, virtually every argument of social consequence—whether about politics, economic policy, taxes, education, healthcare, free markets, global warming, energy policy, foreign policy, immigration policy, sexual behavior, the death penalty, abortion rights, or consumer demand—is either explicitly or implicitly an argument about why people make the choices they make. And, of course,