Humans are lazy. You didn’t need me to tell you that. Status quo bias and inertia constantly work against our better judgement to learn and improve.

In Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s fascinating book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness the two researchers explore how certain psychological triggers and observations can be used to design choices to persuade and “nudge” people to desirable behaviours. One of those observations is the use of defaults.

Default choices are a powerful but simple way to nudge behaviour. Opt-out defaults for magazine subscriptions work wonderfully, as Thaler and Sunstein point out: people continue to pay even when they stop reading. More dramatically, opt-out 401(k) company plans have more than double the savings rates than opt-in plans. When given the choice to do nothing, most will.

As a software developer, this got me thinking: What kind of defaults can I design that will nudge my users to behaviours I find desirable?

It hit me that the influence of defaults went beyond asking the question. Defaults in fact are a big reason that my professional life is easier and more enjoyable than it was before. And I have Rails to thank for that.

Rails is filled with defaults. This is one of the main reason for its success. Someone, somewhere decided that 80% of things developers deliberate on don’t matter. How to structure an application, how to setup a database, which server to test against—there are defaults for all of these and they work out-of-the box for most developers. There’s even a phrase for this: Convention over configuration.

David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Rails, had this to say at RailsConf 2008:

One of the points I keep coming back to with Ruby on Rails, is that we confess commonality. That we confess that we’re not as special as we like to believe. We confess that we’re not the only ones climbing the same mountain…I think the conclusion—the conclusion that we’re not as special and unique as we like to believe—is the fact that the flexibility we think we need, we want—we really don’t.

By designing defaults intelligently, Rails was able to hit that sweet spot of doing as much work for you, while enabling it to get out of the way when needed. I’ve had experienced Rails developers echo this very thing. It goes to show that as something as influential as Rails, defaults can have a big impact.