Chapter 17: Social proof

This category of deceptive pattern involves taking advantage of the social proof cognitive bias, in which people tend to follow the actions of others in order to determine their own behaviour. There are two main types of social proof deceptive patterns: the activity message deceptive pattern, and the testimonial deceptive pattern.

The activity message deceptive pattern

We’ve all seen an activity message before. It’s a little notification that appears on an e-commerce store that tries to persuade you to make a purchase by showing you some sort of message about social activity. Of course, if the message is true then it’s a perfectly acceptable practice. It can be quite useful to know what products are popular in a store – it’s similar to seeing a queue on a street outside a shop, or seeing lots of shoppers holding the same item when queuing to check out. It’s a feature you get for free in the real world, but it’s very easy to fake online. The example below was shared by Henry Neves-Charge on Twitter in 2017.¹

Fake activity with Beeketing’s Sales Pop app

If you don’t have the time or the skills to build your own deceptive patterns, you can actually buy plug-ins for your website that let you add deceptive patterns very easily. As I explained earlier, the Shopify app store sometimes contains a few of them. These apps manage to sneak in by offering tools that can be either used legitimately or configured to deceive users. Other e-commerce platforms have the same sort of problem, including BigCommerce, Weebly and WooCommerce.

In 2019, Shopify removed fourteen apps from its app store, many of which could be configured to deliver deceptive patterns with just a few clicks.² Twelve of them were provided by a company called Beeketing. Here’s one of the Beeketing apps: Sales Pop. It causes an activity message overlay to appear on screen containing claims like ‘9 customers have bought item x together with item y’ or ‘Alycia in San Francisco just bought item x 4 minutes ago’.³

What’s surprising is that Beeketing actively encourages store owners to set this up deceptively. In the Sales Pop app’s support documentation, Beeketing give a barefaced confession⁴:

‘This guide is applied for all the supported platforms except for Shopify. The reason behind it is the recent changes in Shopify policies. There will be no custom notification anymore. Custom notification used to be a highly effective way to create urgency and scarcity for your store. Nevertheless, since the Shopify’s requirement to use real data instead of made-up one, custom notification was left out.’

– Beeketing (2019)

Here’s how easy it is to create a deceptive custom notification using Beeketing Sales Pop. At the time of writing, this is still available for BigCommerce, Weebly and WooCommerce.⁵

As you can see in the screenshot, the merchant picks the locations they want announced in the activity message – either random or manually selected (after all, if they run a local bakery it would look  suspicious if the notification showed an order from 3,000 miles away. No sensible human would order perishable goods from such a distance, so the manual option lets them put in a list of local-sounding places). Then, the merchant can tick a checkbox to have the notifications receive a random ‘time ago’ label up within a 12 hour window, making them look more realistic.

The testimonial deceptive pattern

The testimonial deceptive pattern is an easy one for unscrupulous companies to employ, since it just involves writing something positive about your offering, and then attributing it to a customer. Like this: ‘Harry Brignull’s book on deceptive design may be the best book ever written. —Abraham Lincoln, 1861.’

Now, I know what you’re thinking. This is just false advertising. It’s been around for decades and it’s already regulated. This is indeed true. But even though it’s well known, it’s still common. What’s more, it’s often used in tandem with other deceptive patterns to create a web of pressure and deception. For this reason, it’s worthy of being listed together with the other deceptive patterns. For example, a recent FTC staff report⁶ describes a civil suit that it pursued against RagingBull resulting in a $2.4 million settlement.⁷ It is notable that it describes the deceptive practices as working together to create a ‘compounding effect’:

‘In Raging Bull, for instance, the FTC alleged that the operators of an online stock trading site used deceptive customer testimonials to lure consumers in, hid purported disclaimers in dense terms and conditions text boxes that required scrolling to find, and sold services as a subscription but made it difficult to cancel and stop the recurring charges. The combination of these dark patterns had a compounding effect, increasing the impact of each and exacerbating the harm to the consumer.’ (emphasis added)

— FTC staff report (2022)