You are never choosing in a vacuum. Something always decided the order, the defaults, and the path of least resistance before you walked in.
Every decision happens inside a designed environment, whether anyone admits to designing it or not. The term “choice architecture” was coined to describe this directly: the layout of a cafeteria, the default option on a form, the order items appear in — all of it steers outcomes without technically removing any option from the menu. The theory’s founding claim is that neutral design doesn’t exist; someone always picks the defaults, and defaults are sticky enough to change outcomes by large margins on their own.
The empirical case is strongest on defaults specifically — decisions with identical available options but different pre-selected settings produce dramatically different outcomes purely from which choice requires effort to opt out of. A grocery store applies the same logic physically: milk and bread at the back forces a walk past everything else; checkout-lane placement targets the exact moment willpower is lowest. None of it removes free choice in the formal sense. All of it predicts, with real accuracy, what most people will end up doing anyway.
Source: Thaler, R.H. & Sunstein, C.R. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Yale University Press; Johnson, E.J. & Goldstein, D. (2003). “Do Defaults Save Lives?” Science, 302(5649), 1338–1339.