The Default Effect is a cognitive bias that can influence our decision making and actions.
The Default Effect: “When given a choice between several options, the tendency to favour the default one.”
This is common when filling out forms, or when using a new device (phone, computer) – we typically tend towards the “default” settings.
In short, the “default” is an option that allows us to operate from a lower state of awareness.
We also are prone to the Default Effect through our own behavioural settings.
When we arrive home after work and meet our family, we have a choice in the moment how to act. We choose the default.
What does that actually look like?
How is that landing in the narrative of the person we are relating with?
This ultimately comes back to meditation, “witnessing,” or inner silence, our one system for observing a truer nature of the universe and starting to see the mechanisms of our thoughts.
However, we can also support this with a radical change in environments or conditions and use these to create our own pattern interruptions.
When you shut the phone down for a couple days, the food or language is different and the weather has changed, if you allow it, you have created for yourself to an interruption, a gap – a space in which you aren’t sure.
In the best way possible, you’ve lost momentum.
Do we pick up the default setting again? Or do we observe and listen, maybe try something new?
The Christmas period (and for many, a few days off of work) is a great “gap” – a space to become present with those around us and choose. Choose if we want to roll into 2019 on default settings? Or do we want to explore some new environments and new actions?
