What is default effect behavioral economics?

Example: Your team's deployment pipeline requires six manual approval steps before code ships. Most developers skip two or three of them under deadline pressure, introducing inconsistency. You redesign the pipeline so the default path — doing nothing special — runs all six checks automatically. Developers who need to skip a check must explicitly opt out. Deployments become safer not because people got more disciplined, but because the do-nothing path became the safe path.

This concept is part of Decision Frameworks in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for decision frameworks.