Meet the dark patterns

It’s happened to you 10,000 times: you get an Instagram notification, open the app to see the comment your friend left and… you’re sucked into the vortex. Swept along by the stream, you spend ten minutes scrolling through the bottomless pit of your Insta feed. Several times a day.

And it’s very hard to resist, because the people who design Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Netflix deliberately play on our psychological weaknesses so that we spend as much time as possible on their services.

We’re all more or less aware that social media manipulates us. What we realise less is that 99.9% of e-commerce sites pull similar levers, not to keep us on their pages, but to get us to buy.

They’re called dark patterns: an arsenal of techniques that target not our reason but our vulnerabilities.

We tend to think the human brain is extremely rational when it makes a decision. In reality, some things constantly pull it off its nice logical path: cognitive biases.

Quick trivia break: a cognitive bias is something that makes the brain get things systematically wrong in certain situations. Example: answer this question in your head: “Are you a better or worse driver than average?” Done? Well, you most likely answered, like 9 out of 10 people, that you think you drive better than average. Which means 4 of you are overestimating yourselves… while being convinced you’re right. It’s called “overconfidence bias”, and everyone falls prey to it. And there are dozens and dozens of biases like this one.

Mind you, most of the time these biases are useful. Take overconfidence bias: it’s what encourages us to take the risks that move us forward, whereas overly analytical reasoning could paralyse us. It came in handy 10,000 years ago, when humans had to venture into the forest to hunt (at the risk of getting eaten), and it still does today when it nudges us to quit a job that makes us miserable.

But in online retail, these cognitive biases are harnessed by techniques with just one goal: getting us to buy more. And you probably know these sales techniques very well already.

Playing on scarcity

“Scarcity bias” makes us place disproportionate value on anything that seems rare. That was useful in the Palaeolithic era, when you had to find the motivation to chase a wild boar so as not to starve, in a world where resources really were limited.

But today, with a supermarket on every street corner, brands recreate this scarcity artificially: flash sales, “limited stock” warnings, collabs, collections that change at breakneck speed, drops (those ultra-limited-edition products hyped on social media).

In cases like these, when it makes us overpay for a pair of shoes we don’t need, scarcity bias is working against us. Same goes for when it makes us book a slightly dodgy hotel room because 10 OTHER PEOPLE ARE LOOKING AT THIS PROPERTY RIGHT NOW AND THERE WON’T BE ENOUGH FOR EVERYONE.

Playing on the bargain

The classic example is the crossed-out price: you’re told the product used to cost much more (when that price was artificially inflated) or that it costs much more elsewhere (with no real idea where that figure comes from).

We then fall victim to anchoring bias: our brain treats the reference price as an anchor and gives it disproportionate weight. Whether or not the crossed-out price is genuine, we’re completely swayed by it. It’s exactly like when someone opens a negotiation with a very high price: psychologically, it’s very hard to come back with a much lower figure.

Playing on the herd effect

That’s when you’re invited to top up your basket with “items other customers also bought” or “products frequently bought together”.

Under the guise of doing customers a favour by making sure they don’t forget a “complementary” item, the site is using good old cross-selling techniques, but multiplying their impact thanks to the herd effect: basically, an individual will always prefer to copy the group (even if it means being wrong) rather than be right on their own (check out the brilliant Solomon Asch line experiment if you want to see just how powerful this effect is).

Playing on repeated exposure

You’ve surely been in this situation: you mention a perfume to your friends over a drink and, five minutes later, while browsing Facebook, Insta or a news site, you see an ad for that very perfume. And you think, "No way, my phone is listening to me."

You’re almost right.

Your phone isn’t listening to you, but it knows (sometimes better than you do) what you’re interested in, just by analysing your online behaviour over the past few days. As you browse the internet, every site you visit leaves a little spy in your browser – it’s called a “cookie” to make it sound cuter. That cookie is what’s used for “retargeting”. In other words, for weeks afterwards, on every site you visit, you’ll see ads for the products or services you searched for online… And you might just end up giving in.

It’s called the familiarity principle, or mere-exposure effect, a cognitive bias behind every saturation ad campaign: the more often you see a product, the more familiar it feels, and the more you like it.

Playing on the 9s

One last bias for the road: the nine bias, which explains why so many brands have prices ending in 9. According to this study comparing sales of women’s clothing, a garment priced at 39 dollars reportedly sold 31% more than one priced at 34 dollars!

And then there are the champions, who manage to do it all at once:

Why are dark patterns a problem?

Brands that use dark patterns probably don’t think they’re doing any harm; they just want to boost their sales. And some of these techniques are used in the real world too: the Starbucks barista who asks if you’d like extra caramel, the car salesman who tells you the model you want is the last one in stock, the estate agent who says there are already "two other couples interested"…

So what’s the problem?

The first problem is that online, these techniques are used so systematically and are so finely tuned that they become formidably good at making you buy things you don’t need. As the biologist E.O. Wilson put it, humans have _{“paleolithic emotions and godlike technology”}: even the smartest, savviest brain can’t fight the technological arsenal designed to manipulate it. It’s just like at a fast-food restaurant: the person at the till may ask you now and then if you’d like to add a dessert or go XXL, but nothing beats the self-service kiosk, which gets you to spend 34% more on average.

Yet in a world where overproduction and overconsumption are putting our future at risk, brands have a responsibility: not to get their customers to buy more than they really need. Just because new technologies can do it doesn’t mean they should. Tristan Harris’s “Humane Tech” movement is calling on tech companies to stop playing on our vulnerabilities to grab every last scrap of our attention. In the same way, online brands need to stop manipulating us into overconsuming.

The second problem, just as important, is that dark patterns make us feel stress, fear, frustration... Deeply negative feelings that we already get more than enough of elsewhere in our lives.

Be a Jedi...

Granted, dark patterns are incredibly effective at selling a lot, fast. But a brand that bets on honesty can do just as well. Yes, it’s always tempting to click "buy" when you see -70%. But in the long run, you’ll always prefer the sweater that stands the test of time to the one you bought just because it was on sale. In fact, it’s a bit like refusing to give in to the dark side and trying to master the light side of the Force instead: it’s slower and harder work, but in the end far more powerful.

Simply knowing that dark patterns exist already takes away some of their power. So keep your eyes peeled, and may the Force be with you.

PS:

For a long time, we used quite a few of these dark patterns on Loom’s site. Because we’d never really stopped to think about it.

But when we thought about it, we really don’t want to manipulate you or get you to buy things you don’t need. In the past, pre-orders, retargeting, promotions and “limited stock” displays were valuable tools for growing Loom, but today we can afford _{to do without them}.

So that we’re never tempted by dark patterns again, we’re making the following commitments:

1. We will never show prices ending in 9 (let alone 99)
2. We won’t run any sales or promotions (as we’ve already explained).
3. No more “only X left”: we’ll never again display a time limit for ordering or the number of items left in stock
4. Bye-bye, cookies: we’re removing from our sites any _{cookies that can be used for ad retargeting} on Facebook, Instagram or other websites you visit

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Who are we to say that?

You’re reading La Mode à l’Envers (“fashion inside out”), a blog run by the clothing brand Loom. The textile industry is hanging by a thread, and it’s the planet that’s paying the price. So whatever we figure out about the industry, we try to explain here. Because making clothes that last is good, but lifting the lid, sharing and inspiring is even more powerful.

If you like what we write and want more, sign up to our newsletter by clicking here. Promise: we don’t write often and we never spam.

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Illustration credit: Olivier Balez

Click here to read the English version of this post on Medium.