Social media platforms repeatedly use so-called dark patterns to nudge you toward giving away more of your data.
The problem is that it becomes very difficult to define a dark pattern. “All design has a level of persuasion to it,” says Victor Yocco, the author of Design for the Mind: Seven Psychological Principles of Persuasive Design. By definition, design encourages someone to use a product in a particular way, which isn’t inherently bad. The difference, Yocco says, is “if you’re designing to trick people, you’re an asshole.”
“It’s putting friction in the way of attaining your goal, to make it harder for you to follow through,” says Nathalie Nahai, the author of Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion. Years ago, when Nahai deleted her Facebook account, she found a similar set of manipulative strategies. “They used the relationships and connections I had to say, ‘Are you sure you want to quit? If you leave, you won’t get updates from this person,’” and then displayed the pictures of some of her close friends. “They’re using this language which is, in my mind, coercion,” she says. “They make it psychologically painful for you to leave.”
Worse the research shows that most people don’t even know they’re being manipulated. But according to one study, Colin Gray, a human-computer interaction researcher at Purdue University says, “when people were primed ahead of time with language to show what manipulation looked like, twice as many users could identify these dark patterns.”
At least there’s some hope that greater awareness can give users back some of their control.
