What is environmental influence on decisions?

Environmental influence on decisions is a concept in personal epistemology: The structure of your environment determines your default behavior.

Example: You decide on Sunday night that you will eat healthy lunches this week. By Wednesday, you have eaten fast food twice — not because your commitment weakened, but because the office break room has a vending machine ten steps from your desk and the salad place requires a fifteen-minute walk. You did not choose poorly. Your environment chose for you. The person who moves the fruit bowl to the counter and puts the cookies in the high cabinet does not need more willpower than the person who leaves cookies at eye level. They need less. That is the point.

This concept is part of Phase 38 (Choice Architecture) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for choice architecture.