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"What a stupid way to do business": Towards an Understanding of Older Adults' Perceptions of Deceptive Patterns and Ways to Develop Resistance
Abstract
There are growing efforts to reduce the harmful effects of deceptive patterns pervasively employed on e-commerce websites. However, efforts to produce new guidelines and introduce ethical design standards geared towards older adults have been limited. We investigate the potential of a serious game in fostering older adults' resilience against manipulative designs in e-commerce through two studies. First, a survey with older adults (N = 61), explored their attitudes towards deceptive patterns and identified characteristics influencing them. We then created a serious game, 'Shopopolis', to bolster older adults' resistance to manipulative designs online and evaluated its efficacy with older adults (N = 65). Our findings show that Shopopolis is a valuable tool for enhancing awareness, concern, and recognition skills related to e-commerce deceptive patterns. We discuss older adults' unique perspectives on deceptive patterns and consider how insights can shape the design of targeted protective measures like Shopopolis for older adults in e-commerce contexts.
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Dark patterns are deceptive and malicious properties of user interfaces that lead the end-user to do something different from intended or expected. While now a key topic in critical computing, most work has been conducted in Western contexts. Japan, with its booming app market, is a relatively uncharted context that offers culturally- and linguistically-sensitive differences in design standards, contexts of use, values, and language, all of which could influence the presence and expression of dark patterns. In this work, we analyzed 200 popular mobile apps in the Japanese market. We found that most apps had dark patterns, with an average of 3.9 per app. We also identified a new class of dark pattern: “Linguistic Dead-Ends” in the forms of “Untranslation” and “Alphabet Soup.” We outline the implications for design and research practice, especially for future cross-cultural research on dark patterns.
Dark patterns – design interfaces or features that subtly manipulate people in making suboptimal decisions – are ubiquitous especially in e-commerce websites. Yet, there is little research on the effectiveness of dark patterns, and even lesser studies on testing interventions that can help mitigate their influence on consumers. To that end, we conducted two experiments. The first experiment tests the effectiveness of different dark patterns within a hypothetical single product online shopping context. Results show that, indeed, dark patterns increase the purchase impulsivity across all dark patterns, relative to the control. The second experiment tests the effectiveness of three behaviorally informed interventions on four different dark patterns also in a hypothetical online shopping scenario, but this time offering multiple products instead of a single product. Between-subject analysis shows that not all interventions are equally effective, with uneven impact across dark patterns. However, within-subject results indicate that all interventions significantly reduce purchase impulsivity pre- versus post-intervention, indicating that any intervention is better than none when it comes to combating dark patterns. We then end by discussing the policy implications of our results.
Cookies are widely acknowledged as a potential privacy issue, due to their prevalence and use for tracking users across the web. To address this issue, multiple regulations have been enacted which mandate informing users about data collection via. so-called cookie notices. Unfortunately, these notices have been shown to be ineffective; they are largely ignored, and are generally not understood by end-users. One main source of this ineffectiveness is the presence of dark patterns in notice designs, i.e. user interface design elements that nudge users into performing an action they may not otherwise do, e.g. consent to data collection. In this paper, we investigate the mental models and behavior of users when confronted with dark patterns in cookie notices. We do this by performing a mixed-method study (on Danes in their late-20s) which integrates quantitative and qualitative insights. Our quantitative findings confirm that the design of a cookie notice does influence the decisions of users on whether or not to consent to data collection, as well as whether they recall seeing the notice at all. Our qualitative findings reveal that users do in fact recognize the presence of dark patterns in cookie notice designs, and that they are very uncomfortable with standard practices in data collection. However, they seldom take action to protect their privacy, being overall resigned due to decision fatigue. We conclude that website maintainers need to reconsider how they request consent lest they alienate their users, and that end-users need better solutions that alleviate their burden wrt. protecting their privacy whilst visiting websites that collect data.
Peer support is a powerful tool in improving the digital literacy of older adults. However, while existing literature investigated reactive support, this paper examines proactive support for mobile safety. To predict moments that users need support, we conducted a user study to measure the severity of mobile scenarios (n=300) and users' attitudes toward receiving support in a specific interaction around safety on a mobile device (n=150). We compared classification methods and showed that the random forest method produces better performance than other regression models. We show that user anxiety, openness to social support, self-efficacy, and security awareness are important factors to predict willingness to receive support. We also explore various age variations in the training sample on moments users need support prediction. We find that training on the youngest population produces inferior results for older adults, and training on the aging population produces poor outcomes for young adults. We illustrate that the composition of age can affect how the sample impacts model performance. We conclude the paper by discussing how our findings can be used to design feasible proactive support applications to provide support at the right moment.
Manipulation defines many of our experiences as a consumer, including subtle nudges and overt advertising campaigns that seek to gain our attention and money. With the advent of digital services that can continuously optimize online experiences to favor stakeholder requirements, increasingly designers and developers make use of "dark patterns"-forms of manipulation that prey on human psychology-to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others in ways that present unequal value to the end user. In this paper, we provide an account of end user perceptions of manipulation that builds on and extends notions of dark patterns. We report on the results of a survey of users conducted in English and Mandarin Chinese (n=169), including follow-up interviews from nine survey respondents. We used a card sorting method to support thematic analysis of responses from each cultural context, identifying both qualitatively-supported insights to describe end users' felt experiences of manipulative products and a continuum of manipulation. We further support this analysis through a descriptive analysis of survey results and the presentation of examples from the interviews. We conclude with implications for future research, considerations for public policy, and guidance on how to further empower and give users autonomy in their experiences with digital services.
Misinformation about the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a pressing societal challenge. Across two studies, one preregistered (n 1 ¼ 1771 and n 2 ¼ 1777), we assess the efficacy of two 'prebunking' interventions aimed at improving people's ability to spot manipulation techniques commonly used in COVID-19 misinformation across three different languages (English, French and German). We find that Go Viral!, a novel five-minute browser game, (a) increases the perceived manipulativeness of misinformation about COVID-19, (b) improves people's attitudinal certainty (confidence) in their ability to spot misinformation and (c) reduces self-reported willingness to share misinformation with others. The first two effects remain significant for at least one week after gameplay. We also find that reading real-world infographics from UNESCO improves people's ability and confidence in spotting COVID-19 misinformation (albeit with descriptively smaller effect sizes than the game). Limitations and implications for fake news interventions are discussed.
To understand the underlying process of users' information disclosure decisions, scholars often use either the privacy calculus framework or refer to heuristic shortcuts. It is unclear whether the decision process varies by age. Therefore, using these common frameworks, we conducted a web-based experiment with 94 participants, who were younger (ages 19-22) or older (65+) adults, to understand how perceived app trust, the sensitivity of the data, and benefits of disclosure influence users disclosure decisions. Younger adults were more likely to change their perception of data sensitivity based on trust, while older adults were more likely to disclose information based on perceived benefits of disclosure. These results suggest older adults made more rationally calculated decisions than younger adults, who made heuristic decisions based on app trust. Our findings negate the mainstream narrative that older adults are less privacy-conscious than younger adults; instead, older adults weigh the benefits and risks of information disclosure.
Dark patterns are (evil) design nudges that steer people’s behaviour through persuasive interface design. Increasingly found in cookie consent requests, they possibly undermine principles of EU privacy law. In two preregistered online experiments we investigated the effects of three common design nudges (default, aesthetic manipulation, obstruction) on users’ consent decisions and their perception of control over their personal data in these situations. In the first experiment (N = 228) we explored the effects of design nudges towards the privacy-unfriendly option (dark patterns). The experiment revealed that most participants agreed to all consent requests regardless of dark design nudges. Unexpectedly, despite generally low levels of perceived control, obstructing the privacy-friendly option led to more rather than less perceived control. In the second experiment (N = 255) we reversed the direction of the design nudges towards the privacy-friendly option, which we title “bright patterns”. This time the obstruction and default nudges swayed people effectively towards the privacy-friendly option, while the result regarding perceived control stayed the same compared to Experiment 1. Overall, our findings suggest that many current implementations of cookie consent requests do not enable meaningful choices by internet users, and are thus not in line with the intention of the EU policymakers. We also explore how policymakers could address the problem.
This study investigates the long-term effectiveness of active psychological inoculation as a means to build resistance against misinformation. Using 3 longitudinal experiments (2 preregistered), we tested the effectiveness of Bad News, a real-world intervention in which participants develop resistance against misinformation through exposure to weakened doses of misinformation techniques. In 3 experiments (N Exp1 ϭ 151, N Exp2 ϭ 194, N Exp3 ϭ 170), participants played either Bad News (inoculation group) or Tetris (gamified control group) and rated the reliability of news headlines that either used a misinfor-mation technique or not. We found that participants rate fake news as significantly less reliable after the intervention. In Experiment 1, we assessed participants at regular intervals to explore the longevity of this effect and found that the inoculation effect remains stable for at least 3 months. In Experiment 2, we sought to replicate these findings without regular testing and found significant decay over a 2-month time period so that the long-term inoculation effect was no longer significant. In Experiment 3, we replicated the inoculation effect and investigated whether long-term effects could be due to item-response mem-orization or the fake-to-real ratio of items presented, but found that this is not the case. We discuss implications for inoculation theory and psychological research on misinformation. Public Significance Statement This study shows that inoculation-based media and information literacy interventions such as the Bad News Game can confer protection against the influence of misinformation over time. With regular assessment, the positive effects can be maintained for at least 3 months. Without regular "boosting," the effects dissipate within 2 months.
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires websites to ask for consent to the use of cookies for specific purposes . This enlarges the relevant design space for consent dialogs. Websites could try to maximize click-through rates and positive consent decision, even at the risk of users agreeing to more purposes than intended. We evaluate a practice observed on popular websites by conducting an experiment with one control and two treatment groups ( N = 150 university students in two countries). We hypothesize that users’ consent decision is influenced by (1) the number of options, connecting to the theory of choice proliferation, and (2) the presence of a highlighted default button (“select all”), connecting to theories of social norms and deception in consumer research. The results show that participants who see a default button accept cookies for more purposes than the control group, while being less able to correctly recall their choice. After being reminded of their choice, they regret it more often and perceive the consent dialog as more deceptive than the control group. Whether users are presented one or three purposes has no significant effect on their decisions and perceptions. We discuss the results and outline policy implications.
Recent research has explored the possibility of building attitudinal resistance against online misinformation through psychological inoculation. The inoculation metaphor relies on a medical analogy: by pre-emptively exposing people to weakened doses of misinformation cognitive immunity can be conferred. A recent example is the Bad News game, an online fake news game in which players learn about six common misinformation techniques. We present a replication and extension into the effectiveness of Bad News as an anti-misinformation intervention. We address three shortcomings identified in the original study: the lack of a control group, the relatively low number of test items, and the absence of attitudinal certainty measurements. Using a 2 (treatment vs. control) × 2 (pre vs. post) mixed design (N = 196) we measure participants' ability to spot misinformation techniques in 18 fake headlines before and after playing Bad News. We find that playing Bad News significantly improves people's ability to spot misinformation techniques compared to a gamified control group, and crucially, also increases people's level of confidence in their own judgments. Importantly, this confidence boost only occurred for those who updated their reliability assessments in the correct direction. This study offers further evidence for the effectiveness of psychological inoculation against not only specific instances of fake news, but the very strategies used in its production. Implications are discussed for inoculation theory and cognitive science research on fake news.
Under certain circumstances, humans tend to behave in irrational ways, leading to situations in which they make undesirable choices. The concept of digital nudging addresses these limitations of bounded rationality by establishing a libertarian paternalist alternative to nudge users in virtual environments towards their own preferential choices. Thereby, choice architectures are designed to address biases and heuristics involved in cognitive thinking. As research on digital nudging has become increasingly popular in the Information Systems community, an increasing necessity for ethical guidelines has emerged around this concept to safeguard its legitimization in distinction to e.g. persuasion or manipulation. However, reflecting on ethical debates regarding digital nudging in academia, we find that current conceptualizations are scare. This is where on the basis of existing literature, we provide a conceptualization of ethical guidelines for the design of digital nudges, and thereby aim to ensure the applicability of nudging mechanisms in virtual environments.
Digital technology holds a promise to improve older adults’ well-being and promote ageing in place. However, there seems to be a discrepancy between digital technologies that are developed and what older adults actually want and need. Ageing is stereotypically framed as a problem needed to be fixed, and older adults are considered to be frail and incompetent. Not surprisingly, many of the technologies developed for the use of older adults focus on care. The exclusion of older adults from the research and design of digital technology is often based on such negative stereotypes. In this opinion article, we argue that the inclusion rather than exclusion of older adults in the design process and research of digital technology is essential if technology is to fulfill the promise of improving well-being. We emphasize why this is important while also providing guidelines, evidence from the literature, and examples on how to do so. We unequivocally state that designers and researchers should make every effort to ensure the involvement of older adults in the design process and research of digital technology. Based on this paper, we suggest that ageism in the design process of digital technology might play a role as a possible barrier of adopting technology.
Reflection has become a core interest for game designers. However, empirical research into the kinds and causes for reflection within games is scarce. We therefore conducted an on- line questionnaire where participants (n=101) openly reported perspective-challenging moments within games, their causes, experience, and impact. Where past work has emphasised transformative reflection that changes player’s views and behaviour outside the game, we found that players report predominantly moments of ‘endo’-transformative reflection, which is focused on players’ game-related behaviour and concepts. We further identify some causes of perspective-challenging moments relating to narrative, game systems, game-external sources, and player expectations. Narrative reveals emerge as a key cause of perspective challenge.
Purpose: The credibility of digital news is presently a topic of debate, and curricula underline the importance of media literacy. However, the content and credibility of young people’s news feeds have not been investigated in detail in any large-scale studies. Here we explore the nature of news featured in Swedish upper secondary school students’ news feeds, how news is shared, and how credible the news is according to the students.
Approach: Using citizen science and a mixed methods approach we review 2617 news from authentic news feeds.
Findings: The students’ news feeds primarily contain hard news from established news media. News is predominately found on news domains, not through social media. Soft news is less common and is perceived as less credible. Boys find more sports while girls identify more entertainment and lifestyle news. The news feeds also contain some highly biased political information.
Research limitations: The study was carried out in Sweden, and further international research on authentic news feeds is needed to view results in relation to society and educational practices.
Research and practical implications: In education, students’ news feeds can be used to scrutinize credibility and help students navigate towards credible news domains to support democratic engagement.
Key points in article: -Citizen science approach to map young people’s digital news feeds.−Students predominately read hard news.−Digital news comes primarily from established news media sites deemed credible by students.−On social media, students mostly share news they find credible.−Students' authentic news feeds as potentials and challenges in education and democracy.
After the adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May 2018, more than 60 % of popular websites in Europe were found to display a cookie consent notice. This has quickly led to users becoming fatigued with privacy notifications and contributed to the rise of both browser extensions that block these banners and demands for a solution that bundles consent across multiple websites or in the browser. In this work, we identify common properties of the graphical user interface of consent notices and conduct three studies with more than 80,000 unique users on a German website to investigate their influence on consent. We find that users are more likely to interact with a notice shown in the lower (left) part of the screen. Given a binary choice, more users are willing to accept tracking compared to mechanisms that require them to allow cookie use for each category or company individually. We also show that the practice of nudging is widely used and has a large effect on the choices users make. Our studies have implications for future regulations and the design of consent notices that encourage users to actively make an informed choice.
We conducted a study of n = 20 older adults to better understand their mental models for what the term 'privacy' means to them in both digital and non-digital contexts. Participants were asked to diagrammatically represent this information and describe their drawings in a semi-structured interview setting. Preliminary coding analysis revealed participants' frustrations with available methods for addressing privacy violations. While some asserted that there are both good and bad uses of private data, others avoided technology as a whole out of privacy fears or ambivalence towards using web-based banking and social media services. Some participants described fighting back against privacy attacks, while others felt resigned altogether. Our study provides initial steps towards illuminating privacy perceptions of older adults and can have impacts on training and tailor design for this important demographic.
Are the many formal definitions and frameworks of privacy consistent with a layperson’s understanding of privacy? We explored this question and identified mental models and metaphors of privacy, conceptual tools that can be used to improve privacy tools, communication, and design for everyday users. Our investigation focused on a qualitative analysis of 366 drawings of privacy from laypeople, privacy experts, children, and adults. Illustrators all responded to the prompt “What does privacy mean to you?” We coded each image for content, identifying themes from established privacy frameworks and defining the visual and conceptual metaphors illustrators used to model privacy. We found that many non-expert drawings illustrated a strong divide between public and private physical spaces, while experts were more likely to draw nuanced data privacy spaces. Young children’s drawings focused on bedrooms, bathrooms, or cheating on schoolwork, and seldom addressed data privacy. The metaphors, themes, and symbols identified by these findings can be used for improving privacy communication, education, and design by inspiring and informing visual and conceptual strategies for reaching laypeople.
The rapid spread of online misinformation poses an increasing risk to societies worldwide. To help counter this, we developed a 'fake news game' in which participants are actively tasked with creating a news article about a strongly politicized issue (the European refugee crisis) using misleading tactics, from the perspective of different types of fake news producers. To pilot test the efficacy of the game, we conducted a randomized field study (N = 95) in a public high school setting. Results provide some preliminary evidence that playing the fake news game reduced the perceived reliability and persuasiveness of fake news articles. Overall, these findings suggest that educational games may be a promising vehicle to inoculate the public against fake news.
Interest in critical scholarship that engages with the complexity of user experience (UX) practice is rapidly expanding, yet the vocabulary for describing and assessing criticality in practice is currently lacking. In this paper, we outline and explore the limits of a specific ethical phenomenon known as "dark patterns," where user value is supplanted in favor of shareholder value. We assembled a corpus of examples of practitioner-identified dark patterns and performed a content analysis to determine the ethical concerns contained in these examples. This analysis revealed a wide range of ethical issues raised by practitioners that were frequently conflated under the umbrella term of dark patterns, while also underscoring a shared concern that UX designers could easily become com-plicit in manipulative or unreasonably persuasive practices. We conclude with implications for the education and practice of UX designers, and a proposal for broadening research on the ethics of user experience.
The number of online experiments conducted with subjects recruited via online platforms has grown considerably in the recent past. While one commercial crowdworking platform - Amazon's Mechanical Turk - basically has established and since dominated this field, new alternatives offer services explicitly targeted at researchers. In this article, we present www.prolific.ac and lay out its suitability for recruiting subjects for social and economic science experiments. After briefly discussing key advantages and challenges of online experiments relative to lab experiments, we trace the platform's historical development, present its features, and contrast them with requirements for different types of social and economic experiments.
Social media users may wish to delete their accounts, but it is unclear if this process is easy to complete or if users understand what happens to their account data after deletion. Furthermore, since platforms profit from users' data and activity, they have incentives to maintain active users, possibly affecting what account deletion options are offered. To investigate these issues, we conducted a two-part study. In Study Part 1, we created and deleted accounts on the top 20 social media platforms in the United States and performed an analysis of 490 deletion-related screens across these platforms. In Study Part 2, informed by our interface analysis, we surveyed 200 social media users to understand how users perceive and experience social media account deletion. From these studies, we have four main findings. First, account deletion options vary considerably across platforms and the language used to describe these options is not always clear. Most platforms offer account deletion on desktop browsers but not all allow account deletion from mobile apps or browsers. Second, we found evidence of several dark patterns present in the account deletion interfaces and platform policies. Third, most participants had tried to delete at least one social media account, yet over one-third of deletion attempts were never completed. Fourth, users mostly agreed that they did not want platforms to have access to deleted account data. Based on these results, we recommend that platforms improve the terminology used in account deletion interfaces so the outcomes of account deletion are more clear to users. Additionally, we recommend that platforms allow users to delete their social media accounts from any device they use to access the platform. Finally, future work is needed to assess how users are affected by account deletion related dark patterns.
Inscrutable cookie banners torment users while failing to inform consent.
Gaming is a more accessible, engaging and popular past-time than ever before. Recent research highlights games as strikingly effective means of capturing and holding our attention — so effective, some argue, to the point of deleterious effect. An impassioned CHI2021 panel discussion directed these efforts towards the ethics and adoption of dark patterns. And yet, we know little as to how dark patterns are perceived and arise in the design, development and use of games. This paper seeks to address this knowledge gap by recounting findings from a design-led inquiry comprising interviews and workshops conducted with mobile game players, designers, developers, and business developers. We contribute an understanding of how dark patterns arise in the development, use and commercialisation of mobile games, their effects on players and industry professionals, and means for the consideration, negotiation and navigation of these strategies for gamer-engagement by design — in support of healthier, highly-engaging game experiences.
Misinformation has been identified as a major contributor to various contentious contemporary events ranging from elections and referenda to the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only can belief in misinformation lead to poor judgements and decision-making, it also exerts a lingering influence on people’s reasoning after it has been corrected — an effect known as the continued influence effect. In this Review, we describe the cognitive, social and affective factors that lead people to form or endorse misinformed views, and the psychological barriers to knowledge revision after misinformation has been corrected, including theories of continued influence. We discuss the effectiveness of both pre-emptive (‘prebunking’) and reactive (‘debunking’) interventions to reduce the effects of misinformation, as well as implications for information consumers and practitioners in various areas including journalism, public health, policymaking and education.
Dark patterns are user interface elements that can influence a person's behavior against their intentions or best interests. Prior work identified these patterns in websites and mobile apps, but little is known about how the design of platforms might impact dark pattern manifestations and related human vulnerabilities. In this paper, we conduct a comparative study of mobile application, mobile browser, and web browser versions of 105 popular services to investigate variations in dark patterns across modalities. We perform manual tests, identify dark patterns in each service, and examine how they persist or differ by modality. Our findings show that while services can employ some dark patterns equally across modalities, many dark patterns vary between platforms, and that these differences saddle people with inconsistent experiences of autonomy, privacy, and control. We conclude by discussing broader implications for policymakers and practitioners, and provide suggestions for furthering dark patterns research.
Impulse buying is a common but potentially problematic behavior that can leave consumers with financial hardship and feelings of regret. The goal of this dissertation is to understand how to support consumers who wish to gain greater control of their online impulse buying. This research first investigates how current e-commerce stores encourage impulsive spending by conducting a content analysis of 200 top-earning shopping websites (Study 1). We demonstrate that the use of impulse-driving features is common and we catalog the different types of features that are commonly used. Second, we take a user-centered approach by directly asking consumers what type of support they would like in tackling online impulse buying (Study 2). A survey of 151 frequent online impulse buyers reveals that consumers want tools that, for example, make costs more salient, encourage reflection, enforce spending limits, increase checkout effort, and postpone purchases. Consumers were not interested in social accountability tools or tools utilizing regret or guilt. Relying on these insights, we designed and tested postponement, reflection, and distraction interventions to encourage self-control with e-commerce (Studies 3-5). Through an online experiment, we show that a 25-hour delay is effective at lowering consumer’s felt urge to buy impulsively and also at lowering purchase intent (Study 3). Conversely, an in-lab experiment testing a 10-minute delay on Amazon purchases failed to show a statistically significant decline in the number of impulse products purchased or dollars spent impulsively (Study 4). We highlight that 100% of participants continued to shop during their 10-minute delay to help explain the lack of an effect. Finally, through an online experiment, we show that prompting consumers to spend approximately 3 ½ minutes listing reasons for and against buying a product or engaging in a distracting task reduces the felt urge to buy impulsively and purchase intent. We conclude by asserting that postponement is an effective self-control strategy if (a) the delay is long enough to allow for the natural distractions of life to cool the impulse to buy or (b) is short but focused on either reflecting on the product or focused on something distracting, but not focused on browsing for additional impulse purchases. Taken together, this dissertation takes a consumer advocacy perspective by shedding light on potentially problematic design practices, by identifying opportunities for corporations to engage in more transparent design, and by providing design recommendations for technologies that help consumers achieve greater self-control with e-commerce.
Highlights
• OTA websites used dark patterns to persuade travelers.
• We identified various dark patterns and cognitive biases.
• We describe linkages between dark patterns and cognitive biases.
A Dark Pattern (DP) is an interface maliciously crafted to deceive users into performing actions they did not mean to do. In this work, we analyze Dark Patterns in 240 popular mobile apps and conduct an online experiment with 589 users on how they perceive Dark Patterns in such apps. The results of the analysis show that 95% of the analyzed apps contain one or more forms of Dark Patterns and, on average, popular applications include at least seven different types of deceiving interfaces. The online experiment shows that most users do not recognize Dark Patterns, but can perform better in recognizing malicious designs if informed on the issue. We discuss the impact of our work and what measures could be applied to alleviate the issue.
Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions. We present automated techniques that enable experts to identify dark patterns on a large set of websites. Using these techniques, we study shopping websites, which often use dark patterns to influence users into making more purchases or disclosing more information than they would otherwise. Analyzing ~53K product pages from ~11K shopping websites, we discover 1,818 dark pattern instances, together representing 15 types and 7 broader categories. We examine these dark patterns for deceptive practices, and find 183 websites that engage in such practices. We also uncover 22 third-party entities that offer dark patterns as a turnkey solution. Finally, we develop a taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics that describes the underlying influence of the dark patterns and their potential harm on user decision-making. Based on our findings, we make recommendations for stakeholders including researchers and regulators to study, mitigate, and minimize the use of these patterns.
Fake news about climate change refers to fabricated information that mimics the appearance of legitimate reporting but is intended to mislead consumers. In light of concerns about fake news regarding climate change and other topics, researchers and media providers have been searching for ways to limit its spread and influence. This study tested the effect of two simple interventions, both of which primed critical thinking, on individuals’ evaluation of the credibility of real and fake news about climate change on Facebook. Through an online experiment (n = 2,750 participants), participants either read a series of guidelines for evaluating news online, or read and then rated the importance of each guideline; a control group was not exposed to guidelines of any type. We found that participants exposed to both types of guidelines reported a reduced likelihood to trust, like, and share fake news about climate change on Facebook. Importantly, exposure to these guidelines did not diminish individuals’ likelihood to trust, like, or share legitimate climate news. The effect sizes for both types of intervention were small. However, because of the scale and speed at which social media operates, even a small reduction in users’ likelihood to trust, like, and share fake news could be meaningful and impactful.
Gameplay frequently involves a combination of positive and negative emotions, where there is increasing interest in how to design for more complex forms of player experience. However, despite the risk that some of these experiences may be uncomfortable, there has been little empirical investigation into how discomfort manifests during play and its impact on engagement. We conducted a qualitative investigation using an online survey (N=95), that focused on uncomfortable interactions across three games: Darkest Dungeon, Fallout 4 and Papers, Please. The findings suggest games create discomfort in a variety of ways; through providing high-pressure environments with uncertain outcomes and difficult decisions to make, to the experience of loss and exposing players to disturbing themes. However, while excessive discomfort can jeopardize player engagement, the findings also indicate that discomfort can provide another facet to gameplay, leading to richer forms of experience and stimulating wider reflections on societal issues and concerns.
E-commerce sites have an incentive to encourage impulse buying, even when not in the consumer's best interest. This study investigates what features e-commerce sites use to encourage impulse buying and what tools consumers desire to curb their online spending. We present two studies: (1) a systematic content analysis of 200 top e-commerce websites in the U.S. and (2) a survey of online impulse buyers (N=151). From Study 1, we find that e-commerce sites contain multiple features that encourage impulsive buying, including those that lower perceived risks, leverage social influence, and enhance perceived proximity to the product. Conversely, from Study 2 we find that online impulse buyers want tools that (a) encourage deliberation and avoidance, (b) enforce spending limits and postponement, (c) increase checkout effort, (d) make costs more salient, and (e) reduce product desire. These findings inform the design of "friction'' technologies that help users make more deliberative consumer choices.
Older adults (65+) use a wide range of digital media, yet have been slow in adopting social media specifically. In this paper, we explore to what extent privacy concerns could be a barrier to social media adoption in this demographic. By analyzing in-depth interviews with 40 older adult users and non-users of social media living in East York1, Toronto, Canada, we explore the types of social media privacy concerns that older adults have as well as the strategies they employ to mitigate these concerns. We found that older adult social media users and non-users shared similar privacy concerns; the most often mentioned being a concern for unauthorized access to personal information, and information misuse. While older adult non-users of social media protected themselves by avoiding social media, older adults who were social media users protected themselves by limiting the information they shared. This study has policy implications for training programs geared toward older adults and informs understandings of privacy literacy across the lifespan.
Older adults consistently reject digital technology even when designed to be accessible and trustworthy.