A medical insurance company was planning to roll out a newly designed offering that changed the format of user choice options from an opt-in to an opt-out structured policy. In preparation for the launch, our client wanted to:
Our behavioral science consultant used this moment to introduce the language of Choice Architecture, which describes the design, presentation, and framing of options and the need to carefully consider pre-set options (also known as Defaults) as people tend to avoid change and stick with original settings.
Translating these themes into behavioral science terminology enabled us to share a vast amount of literature on the topic from infamous studies about organ donation policies to recent data and evidence of interventions in retirement legislative reform (i.e., the Secure 2.0 Act passed in December 2022).
Giving our client the language to describe “defaults” helped them recognize how vital it was to consider the defaults and decision-making environments they created with this plan. By naming the phenomenon, we were able to tap into analogous situations in which other insurance companies had leveraged defaults to encourage people to engage with information that unlock proactive behaviors to improve their health, wealth and lives overall.
By sharing examples and evidence of the magnitude defaults can have on behavior, we helped our client improve the choice environments (“the options”) they created so their customers could be better informed and equipped to make more intuitive, positive decisions for their health