A cognitive bias is a common weakness or mistake that all humans make because of the way our minds are structured.A cognitive bias is a, is a common weakness or mistake that all humans make because of the way our minds are structured. And it takes a lot of educational effort to overcome those biases. So when those psychologists originally did that work on biases, they were looking at understanding the human mind with a view to making things better for people. So, for example, if you’re designing an aircraft cockpit, or a safety critical system in a power station, you design it to make sure that people don’t make those mistakes, because then something very bad would happen. But the interesting thing nowadays, is that people will buy books on cognitive biases, or learn about it and think, well hang on a minute, maybe we can use it to sell more, whatever it is that we sell. So the bias is then flipped around from using that understanding to help people, into using that understanding to sell something to them, or to trick them into clicking on a thing. Which really isn’t along the lines of the original psychologists’ intent, when they did that work.
How far can you go down this road before you really start looking around and realizing quite how dark things have gotten around here?
Right, yeah. Sort of the, are we the baddies moment, yeah. I think really, if your team is focused on your customers, and satisfying a real user need, and you have a good understanding of that need, and you have lots of ideas on how to help, help those people solve the problems that you’re trying to help them with, then you’re relatively unlikely to start going into the territory of dark patterns and trickery. Because the core idea is that useful and that handy for them. I think dark patterns come along when you’ve, you might not have such a great idea, or the idea itself is bedded in, and you’re kind of running out of, you’re at the bottom of the barrel, you’re running out of ideas, you don’t know quite how to get more people to, to do the stuff that you need them to do to make money, and that’s when the dark patterns start coming out. How can we get more people to… If you have a very, very generic game that you’ve made, that’s much like any other, how do you get more people to buy the thing that you’re trying to sell? That’s when you’re going to use dark patterns, because you’re unoriginal and you’re kind of stuck.