The world of behavioral science exploded in 2008 when Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Richard H. Thaler and eminent behavioral scientist Cass R. Sunstein came up with the term, "nudge." In its simplest form, nudge describes a change in the decision-making environment that works with those making a decision to facilitate choices that are in their best interest. The term itself has since become a stand-in for any intervention supported by behavioral science, particularly in the domain of public policy.
More recently, there has been an expansion of the behavioral science taxonomy surrounding so-called "choice architecture" first proposed by Thaler and Sunstein. Dilip Soman, Professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business, suggests that there could also be far more sinister forms of nudges—changes that impede decision-making in the best interests of the decision-maker. Called sludge, this type of change is adjacent to dark patterns, which are essentially nudging for bad and involve customers or beneficiaries of policies being nudged towards making choices that could actively harm them.
Dark nudges, or sludges, are more than cunning designs that curtail behavior change by adding (or not removing) friction. Sludges can also be used to make a less desirable behavior frictionless, thereby perpetuating it. For instance, it is much easier to sign up for and use an investment application than to close such an account. To design a sludge requires some degree of originality to knowingly encourage harmful actions. In other words, sludges require dark creativity or the capacity to have good ideas to do bad things.
“I want to quit the gym,” said Chandler Bing in an episode of F.R.I.E.N.D.S. when he tried to opt-out of his gym membership. He found this incredibly difficult because of the gym’s tactics to prevent him from quitting. He rallied Ross for help, who unfortunately became a member himself. They then wanted to close their bank accounts, so that their monthly gym membership wouldn’t get deducted, but they met with more behavioral quicksand at the bank.
Sludges like these aren’t uncommon; we often see them come up in many government-facing or bureaucratic processes, such as applying for formal documentation that requires one to submit a range of various documents or read complex, jargon-filled terms that are not easy to understand to even those who designed them. The now-famous example is canceling a subscription to a newspaper being a far more arduous task than subscribing to it in the first place. As Thaler tells it, there’s a lot of sludge in canceling a subscription, going through at least ten steps.
Where does dark creativity fit in? It’s all in the design. Companies, governments, and service providers may be unintentionally designing sludge-filled environments without considering the user’s viewpoint; but in some cases, it may be entirely intentional. Take the case of travel booking websites in the UK, which peddled discounts to customers looking for a hotel room booking while specifying prices for a completely different type of hotel room. Thus, the “Was $250, now $150” may not really be for the same room because the travel booking website either conveniently did not mention what “was $250” or mentioned it in the fine print or hidden text that customers don’t immediately see.
In sludges that could have a more serious bearing on public health, research has also revealed that alcohol companies often used symbols and colors in “responsible drinking” advertisements that actually primed users toward drinking.
In more recent times, former United States President Donald Trump’s campaign used a check box for recurring donations, which was ticked by default. This meant that anyone who neglected to uncheck the box was actually signing up to donate multiple times, potentially without having read what the checkbox was for.
Finally, in what has become a major grouse for design researchers around the world, the “accept cookies” box often comes in many shapes and sizes. As you may have noticed, websites with cookie agreements almost always come with a default that nudges users to select “Accept all cookies,” even though there are hidden options for managing preferences. In some cases, cookie agreement banners will take over the entire page and have a very tiny option to close or ignore the agreement. These are all examples of cleverly designed sludges that are from a larger deceptive pattern.
How do we navigate sludges, then? It depends which side you are on and what your intention is. If you’re a behavioral scientist hoping to effect rigorous change and make things easier for the public, try doing a behavioral audit to identify and remove such points of friction. If you’re in Big Tech and intend to prevent customers from switching platforms or applications, you can thicken the quicksand. If you’re a customer, you can try to exercise self-control and acknowledge that every service provider may not have your best behaviors at heart. After all, the best way to navigate through quicksand is to completely avoid it.
Hansika Kapoor
First featured in: Psychology Today (27/08/2021)
