Trust as a Test for Unethical Persuasive Design
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Trust as a Test for Unethical Persuasive Design Johnny Brennan 1 Received: 29 April 2020 / Accepted: 12 October 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Persuasive design (PD) draws on our basic psychological makeup to build products that make our engagement with them habitual. It uses variable rewards, creates Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), and leverages social approval to incrementally increase and maintain user engagement. Social media and networking platforms, video games, and slot machines are all examples of persuasive technologies. Recent attention has focused on the dangers of PD: It can deceptively prod users into forming habits that help the company’s bottom line but not the user’s wellbeing. But PD is not inherently immoral. We can take advantage of our psychological biases to make beneficial changes in ways that enhance our agency rather than limit it. Knowing that a tool is persuasively designed is a consideration in favor of using it when we are trying to break bad habits, such as smoking. How are we to conceptually distinguish between ethical and unethical uses of PD? In this paper, I argue that unethical uses of PD betray or erode our trust. Annette Baier offers a moral test for trust: If gaining knowledge about what other parties do with our trust in them would lead us to stop trusting, then that trusting relationship is immoral. I apply this test to the case of PD. Using trust as a litmus test for ferreting out unethical PD has several advantages, one of which is that it reveals how the harm of unethical PD extends beyond the individual to her wider social network. I close the paper by investigating these cascading effects. Keywords Applied ethics . Technology . Persuasive design . Trust . Betrayal .
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1 Introduction Persuasive design (PD) is a process of creating technologies that tap into our basic psychological structures in order to automate behavioral change. PD draws on the basic motivators of pleasure and pain, hope and fear, and social acceptance or rejection. It
* Johnny Brennan [email protected]
1
Philosophy Department, Fordham University, New York, NY, USA
J. Brennan
incites these motivators through prompts like notifications or alerts (called “triggers”), seeking to associate the elicited motivators with a target behavior (Fogg 2009a, b). Products that are candidates for PD are ones that require “ongoing, unprompted user engagement and therefore need to build user habits” (Eyal 2014, 18). Social media and networking platforms, incremental games, and slot machines are all examples of persuasive technologies (PTs) because they leverage our psychologies to make our engagement with them a matter of habit.1 We use them without a second’s thought, often navigating to them without realizing it. Unsurprisingly, a good deal of attention has been paid to the potential dangers of PD. An episode of the investigative journalism podcast Reveal was devoted to the fallout of PD (Letson 2019). Reporters exposed how Facebook hooks young kids on games and makes it all too easy to
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