What is default effect psychology?

Default effect psychology is a concept in personal epistemology: Configure your tools defaults to support your most common workflows.

Example: Your note-taking app ships with a blank page as the default template. Every time you create a new note, you manually type a date, a heading, a tag, and a source field. You do this forty times a week — that is forty micro-decisions and roughly ten minutes of pure mechanical overhead. You change the default template to include today's date auto-populated, a heading prompt, a tag dropdown, and a source field. Now every new note starts pre-structured for your most common workflow. The template is not doing the thinking for you. It is removing the friction that sits between you and the thinking.

This concept is part of Phase 46 (Tool Mastery) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for tool mastery.