People are more likely to choose an option when it is preselected. Such default effects are traditionally assumed to be stronger when people invest little cognitive effort; however, empirical findings supporting this assumption are mixed. We propose that this apparent insensitivity arises because default effects are based on both passive processes (e.g., inaction due to convenience) and active processes (e.g., deliberate inferences about the default’s purpose), which may respond differently to cognitive effort. Across five experiments (N = 1,598), we estimated the relative contribution of these processes with a novel process dissociation procedure. Contrary to our predictions, neither passive nor active components systematically varied with cognitive load or Need for Cognition. Exploratory analyses suggested that passive, but not active, components were stronger for faster decisions. Our results support previous theorizing that default effects arise from different processes, but show no evidence that these processes systematically depend on people’s cognitive effort.
Ingendahl et al. (Thu,) studied this question.