This document describes an empirical study assessing the adoption of default methods in Java 8. The study involved issuing pull requests to 19 open source Java projects on GitHub that contained refactorings migrating interface method implementations to default methods. The study found that developers adopted default methods when the implementation was localized to the interface or parameters, provided optional behavior, or allowed static methods to be called as instance methods. Developers rejected default methods when compatibility with older JDK versions was required to support legacy clients. The study presents a novel proactive technique for assessing new language features by introducing them to developers via automated refactoring rather than relying on postmortem analysis.