Using Persuasive Strategies Inside App Distribution
Platforms to Warn Users About Manipulative Design
Used by Applications
Pooria Babaei
1
, Julita Vassileva
1,∗
1
University of Saskatchewan, 176 Thorvaldson Bldg, 110 Science Place, Saskatoon, SK, S7N 5C9, Canada
Abstract
The number of available websites and mobile applications is continuously increasing along with the use
of persuasive strategies (PS) to inuence human behavior and decision-making. While designing for
persuasion has its benets, recent developments have brought to light the existence of manipulative design
(MD), known as dark patterns, which use psychological factors to guide people in desired directions from
someone else perspective. Earlier studies have classied MD, analyzed the impact on users, measured the
prevalence, and evaluated it from a user perspective. However, there has been little work informing and
warning people of MD. In this study, we propose to investigate the impact of employing PS in mobile app
distribution platforms to inform users about the MD used by mobile applications. Our research would be
considered as a baseline for future investigation aiming to caution users about MD usage within app
distribution platforms.
Keywords
Persuasive Strategy, Manipulative Design, Behavior Change
1. Introduction
Nowadays, technology is present everywhere and the number of websites and mobile applica-
tions is increasing rapidly. The main objective of designers when creating interfaces is to help
users achieve their objectives by making them easy to understand and presenting information in
a way that is easy to access. Lately, there has been a signicant increase in the use of technology
to aect how humans make decisions. By understanding psychological principles that govern
human thinking, designers can create user experiences that intentionally and eectively inu-
ence people’s behavior in ways that are benecial for them. Persuasive strategies have been used
in various domains, such as online commerce, fundraising, promotion [
1
,
2
,
3
], mental health
[
4
], warning compliance [
5
,
6
], and have shown persuasive inuences [
7
]. While persuasive
design strategies are not inherently alarming, the knowledge of how the human mind operates
can also be exploited for unethical purposes, manipulating users’ decision-making process in
ways that go against their goals and are in favor of other stakeholders, owners (shareholders) of
Proceedings of BehavRec ’23, the First International Workshop on Behavior Change and Persuasive Recommender Systems
at the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys ’23), Singapore, September 18-22, 2023
∗
Corresponding author.
[email protected] (P. Babaei); [email protected] (J. Vassileva)
https://artsandscience.usask.ca/profile/JVassileva (J. Vassileva)
0000-0003-0640-9264 (P. Babaei); 0000-0001-5050-3106 (J. Vassileva)
© 2023 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR
Workshop
Proceedings
http://ceur-ws.org
ISSN 1613-0073
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
authority social inuence
2. Background
2.1. Persuasive Strategies vs. Manipulative Designs
Persuasive
Technology
Figure 1:
2.2. Persuasive Strategies (PS)
consensus social inuence
authority
fear
fear social inuence authority
2.3. Manipulative Designs
3. Methodology
Table 1
authority social inuence
Figure 2:
Table 2
Figure 3:
4. Expected Results and Contributions
References
