[hinkley]

Buying groceries when you’re feeling good, and changing your route through the store to groom yourself for success instead of failure, are common, effective bits of advice for weight loss and healthy eating. Most of the garbage really is in the middle of the store, and I imagine myself diving into deep water to grab ketchup, soup, flour. Get in, get out, no sightseeing.

[analog31]

My shopping list is sequential by aisle, so I don't go down the aisle if it's not on my list.

I wonder if shopping online for delivery helps curb impulse buying

[lazide]

Online delivery unfortunately makes it almost impossible to ‘pick an aisle’, as you’re going to get exposed to dark patterns and ads constantly while interacting with the site.

You also can’t actually see what you’re buying (or feel/touch the actual box), which greatly increases the odds of catching shenanigans.

[antwerp1]

Is “dark patterns” basically behavioral economics or a technical term?

[lazide]

Behavioral economics is ‘white hat’. Influencing (in the actual definition). Figuring out how to get them something that actually does benefit them, and modifying the environment or ‘nudging’ the target to encourage it.

Dark patterns is when the actual long (or short) term benefit of the ‘target’ is not a meaningful part of the goal, and the only consideration given is just a given result for the person with the power. Aka manipulation.

Helping someone looking for an off-road vehicle (because they actually need it), your off-road vehicle which is a pretty good one, is behavioral economics.

Using the same tactics to get the exact same someone to buy your luxury car is dark patterns.

Notably, a con artist/fraud is the criminal face of it - since they never even give the target a car at all, but take their money.

The difference between influence and manipulation is the consideration of the actual well being of the target, and the degree of autonomy allowed the target.

Needless to say, this is also the first thing miscreants start deluding themselves and others on when they start getting predatory.

So it’s a very dangerous area to be in for anyone who actually values ethics/morals.

[antwerp1]

Thank you. Is it a technical term used in marketing?

Plenty of people also criticize behavioral economics for being manipulative, especially if they don’t agree with the behavior to be “corrected”

[lazide]

Which one?

Hard to disagree with them at some level, but putting toothpaste next to the sweets (or advertising how great your toothpaste in general is) feels pretty different from random online ads calling people’s dicks small to sell enlargement pills or making fun of someone’s makeup to sell a glow up (yes, very much a thing).

[hinkley]

Try shopping just the exterior.

The head of UI at Homegrocer was a friend of a friend when they were at their peak, and I was in the middle of my second affair with UX, so we occasionally talked.

He told me he was getting pressure to incorporate dark patterns (though that phrase hadn’t made the rounds at the time) into the site design to get people to do more impulse buying.

Sadly if he had they might still be around.