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Dark patterns are design features crafted to manipulate and drive actions within persuasive digital environments, thanks to human psychology hacking tools. The term gained in popularity since the world population having access to a computer and an internet connection is steadily growing. These dark design features embody human decision-making attac...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... (2011) states that our surrounding environment, rich in information to process, is often overwhelming and saturating the capacity of the brain. It leads the latter to rely on System 1 in 95% of the situations to make decisions and only 5% of the time to rely on System 2 (see Figure 1). Such extensive use of the "primitive" system 1 in decision-making will create some vulnerability throughout a list of biases. ...
Context 2
... the case of this fake discount example, we can figure out that the full listed price on which a big discount has been applied is at least hypothetical, if not totally imaginary. In the case of Booking.com, when one hovers his mouse over the price, there is a long and fuzzy explanation stating that the discount is hypothetical (if not synthetical) considering the fact that "[rates] compared to other check-in dates at the same time of year are lower" (see Figure 10). This fantasist discount dark pattern raises some ethical concerns about the misinformation that it induces. ...
Context 3
... how many rooms remain in reality, or how many people are really watching is not clearly detailed and could be -again -the result of a vague calculation as much as it could be a total fantasy (e.g., OneTravel booking website and a proven to be fake "í µí³ people are watching" pop-up; see Baraniuk, 2019). A pop-up notification with the "Someone just booked this" feature often accompanies these kinds of limited supply messages (see Figure 11). They are aimed to trigger a fast decision from the consumer, based on his system 1 limbic brain which uses emotional reactions to act (i.e. in this case the fear of missing an opportunity) and biases to decide. ...
Context 4
... main experiment page is a hotel listing page looking like those of Booking.com, displaying a list of 4 hotels of the same category with their prices, stipulated in dollars for one night; on every hotel in the list there is a "Book now!" button, and at the bottom of the listing page a "I do not want to book now" button to help less involved participants to quit faster by not jamming and erring the experiment results (see Figure 13 for the experiment flowchart; ...
Context 5
... an introductory poll is present as the first step of the experiment (which cannot be bypassed) where classic questions to better know the participants are asked (see Figure 13). ...
Context 6
... descriptive statistics of responsetime are comforting, for the moment, our third hypothesis of information overload delaying the moment of action. Figure 14 graphically backs-up H3 by explicitly showing an extended response time in the treatment groups. In order to make a conclusion with statistical robustness, we will evaluate the relationship between responsetime and dp_yn with a simple OLS model; we will not include control variables since they are too exogeneous to be useful. ...
