Chapter 21: How deceptive patterns can be more harmful when combined
In 2021, Lior Strahilevitz, a law professor at the University of Chicago, and Jamie Luguri, a PhD in experimental social psychology, came up with a clever way to investigate the quantitative impact of deceptive patterns. They created an online survey that had deceptive patterns in the final section. The main part of the survey was about privacy, but these were all decoy questions, acting as a prelude to the deceptive pattern that would appear near the end.
Strahilevitz and Luguri created a number of different versions of the survey: a control version without any deceptive patterns; a ‘mild’ dark pattern version; and an ‘aggressive’ deceptive pattern version. You can see the control and mild versions in the figures below. I haven’t included the aggressive version here because it’s so bulky. If you’re interested to read more, you can refer to their 2021 paper, ‘Shining a Light on Dark Patterns’.1
In their study, the control condition asks the user if they want to sign up for a ‘data protection and credit history monitoring’ service that costs $8.99 a month after a free trial period. The user can then either accept or decline without any funny business – there are no deceptive patterns at work.
The mild deceptive pattern makes things a bit more difficult for the user, as shown in the figures below.
To summarise, in the mild deceptive pattern condition the user is initially given the same paragraph of text, but they can then pick either ‘Accept and continue (recommended)’, which is highlighted in bold; or they can pick ‘Other options’. Picking ‘Other options’ takes them to another step with more radio buttons. If they try to opt out again (‘I do not want to protect my data or credit history’), they are taken to yet another step. This design contains a range of different deceptive patterns: visual interference, trick wording and obstruction. The aggressive deceptive pattern condition is similar, except it has even more steps and lays on even more pressure. The aggressive version also has a countdown timer that forces users to dwell on the subsequent pages, so they can’t just skip through quickly.
The researchers deployed this survey to 1,963 participants. The scale of the impact was staggering:
‘users exposed to mild dark patterns were more than twice as likely to sign up for a dubious service as those assigned to the control group, and users in the aggressive dark pattern condition were almost four times as likely to subscribe.’
— Lugiri and Strahilevitz (2021)
Strahilevitz also concluded that ‘It’s the mild dark patterns that are most insidious’ because ‘They significantly increased acceptance of a program with dubious benefits without alienating consumers or causing large numbers of them to log off.’3
This is an important point. When companies use deceptive patterns, they often don’t particularly want to draw attention to their actions from anyone – whether it’s their users, consumer action groups, regulators or enforcers.