Recently, I opened a well-known, global online shopping app. Hundreds of every kind of product, the usual kind of place. I knew exactly what I needed, so without letting notifications, colors, or interesting products distract me, I quickly typed the product’s name into the search bar. When the results came up, I froze. Besides the product coming in several varieties at different prices, I saw that the same product was being offered by dozens of sellers.
In situations like this, the first thing I look at is how many products a seller has sold and how many of their buyers left reviews. But as I went through the reviews, I noticed that the 1-star and 5-star ratings were almost equal, and that both extremes were fiercely certain, saying either “buy it” or “don’t buy it.” It also occurred to me that the reviews might have been paid for, so I stopped using them as a criterion. Using price would have been pointless too, since the difference between sellers was negligible. I decided to trust a seller whose reviews were less polarized and added the product to my cart. A warning immediately popped up at the bottom: add this much more and shipping would be free.
The product I was buying was too cheap to be worth paying shipping on, so I started wondering whether there was anything else I needed. Just then another notification arrived: if I reached a certain amount, I’d get 25 percent off. Okay, I said, let me look for one more product that’s worth the discount. But I couldn’t think of anything I needed. So I clicked the home button and, hoping something would come to mind, started browsing the best sellers.
On the one hand, a voice inside me said: buy what you need and get out. The other side of me said that the cheap product I’d found wasn’t worth the shipping, and that with a discount coupon already on the table, I should buy one more thing. So I spent a bit more time in the app and ended up adding a few more things I didn’t need to my cart. By the time I noticed how inconsistent I was being, a full two hours had passed. I was angry at myself and gave up on buying anything at all. Still, I realized the experience had reminded me of a few things about marketing, and I decided to write this piece.
A few years ago, when I became interested in economics and marketing, I came across the book “Nudge,” written by the Nobel Prize–winning economist Richard H. Thaler and the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein. We later covered the term in my master’s program as well. A nudge is a practice that encourages people in a positive direction. For example, instead of issuing warnings to save electricity, adding a small note to the bill saying “your neighbors are spending this much less than you” can increase positive behavior change. Or, when a system is set up so that people must opt out if they don’t want to donate their organs, instead of filling out a form saying “I want to donate,” the share of people who remain donors is much higher.
But there is also what is seen as the opposite: tactics designed to trigger impulsive behavior and make good decisions harder (dark patterns). A few of them are the free-shipping threshold, which triggers the urge to get shipping “free”; countdowns that pressure you to decide quickly; and the dysfunction of search and filtering (sludge). Sludge, which literally means mud, has been defined as practices that slow users down and wear down their willpower so that they decide in the seller’s favor. Unfortunately, dark patterns are used by the apps we open not occasionally but every day, beginning with the shopping example I described above and including most social media apps. The design of these apps is like the slot machines in casinos. Just as an unexpected, “lucky” win keeps players at the machine longer, pages full of endless, intriguing product images and algorithms that hand out variable-ratio rewards keep users in the app.
The result is shopping sessions in which, unaware of the hours we are spending, we toss into our carts and buy many products we don’t need. As for the confusion that an abundance of options, distraction or complexity keeps us in the app which is exactly wanted. Because this way, many other products we never intended to buy catch our eye and start landing in our carts.
Let’s walk through what happened in the shopping app, step by step:
- The first tactic is the app drawing you in somehow by being a platform where you can find everything with cheap prices. This is inevitably makes you think, “let me take a look, even if just to get some ideas.”
- Even if the abundance of options tires you at first, the second tactic comes into play at this point: going exploring. The app doesn’t want you to pick what you’re looking for quickly, because leaving quickly isn’t the behavior it wants. Somewhere along the way, your brain starts to take pleasure simply in “exploring” and seeing new and different products. This switches off the system that evaluates logically and filters in order to choose, and your hand starts scrolling, curious to see more. Meanwhile, the constant notifications help scatter your attention and keep you acting on impulse.
- At this point the third tactic comes in: reinforce and reward the behavior. As you stay in the app and add products to your cart, you start being given coupons, points, or rewards. So if there are things you added “unnecessarily,” those coupons and discounts keep you from feeling bad, because you bought them anyway “on sale” or as a “reward.”
- When you finally reach the last step and are about to pay, even if there are unnecessary things in your cart, you don’t want to erase this shopping experience you’ve spent so much time on. This situation, which is common in casinos too, is called the sunk cost fallacy in behavioral economics. In other words, to make all that time spent “worth it,” you want to complete the purchase.
Returning to my own experience: by the time I went to my cart and realized what I’d been through, a full two hours had passed. Yet buying the product I needed would have taken five minutes. I emptied the cart completely before falling into the sunk cost fallacy. I even got carried away and deleted the app too. I went out for a walk and decided to find what I needed outside, at a store.
My intention in sharing this experience is not, of course, to argue that online shopping or social media should be banned. But at a time when we are talking about the attention economy, screen time, and our scattered focus, and when it is being debated whether reading rates and school performance are falling because of these causes, I think the use of dark pattern tactics is unethical.
Consumers becoming more aware does not make it legitimate for platforms to exploit these weaknesses. Losing our limited time and our analytical thinking skills will also prove right the concerns that AI could come to dominate humanity. Because the core of that concern is that we leave thinking and decision-making to machines and become unable to oversee them. And yet we could use psychology, marketing, and communication techniques far more beneficially, in consumers’ favor, and design fair practices. A sustainable system in which we don’t buy what we don’t need demands this as well.
What do you think? What do you pay attention to when you shop? Let me know in the comments!
References
OECD. (2024). Student performance. In Society at a glance 2024. OECD Publishing. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/society-at-a-glance-2024_918d8db3-en/full-report/student-performance_0de10938.html
Schüll, N. D. (2012). Addiction by design: Machine gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton University Press.
Thaler, R. H. (2018). Nudge, not sludge. Science, 361(6401), 431. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau9241
Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Yale University Press.