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Choice Architecture
Choice architecture is the design of a situation which materially affects what people end up selecting. So if you are building a program, and it can be something really small that involves interactions between customers and a company — that architect is often determining choices that small design details can determine what the outcomes are.
It could be, for example, the design of a grocery store which produces a lot of sludge before people can get alcohol or high-calorie chocolate. Or it can be the design of a grocery store that makes the healthiest products the most visible. Choice architecture can be a website which makes certain things have large font and an easy click and other things have small font and you’ve got to click seven times. If you’re automatically enrolled in a savings program, but you can easily opt out, that’s choice architecture.
And the basic idea is that sometimes if the goal is to change behavior, what would be good is if people have an intervention that preserves their freedom of choice, but that nudges them in a direction that will make their lives go better.
Opt-in vs. Opt-out Programs
I’ll give you an example of the difference between opt-in and opt-out, which is something that I was privileged to be involved in in government. And the issue is whether poor children are allowed to benefit from a program that entitles them to free lunch and free breakfast at school. So it’s a program that says if you’re poor, and this means really poor, you have a legal right to free breakfast and free lunch. And these are nutritious lunches and breakfast. They make a big difference to families.
Under the opt-in design, by which the parents had to sign up for the program, the level of participation was disappointingly low. So a little sludge had to be navigated by the families to get their kids in the program. And we don’t know why so many didn’t navigate the sludge. We don’t know whether they were scared they got a form from the government and maybe they were in trouble. We don’t know whether they were really busy or whether they were just confused, they didn’t know what the form was about and they threw it away or they just suffered from inertia and they thought I’ll fill out that form at some other time and at the time when they wanted to fill out the form, they couldn’t find it. For whatever reason, the rate of participation was disappointingly low. So think, what is the design solution to that? The design solution that was adopted in my country was called direct certification, which means that if the school or the locality knows that child is poor, they’re automatically in, they don’t have to sign up at all. That doesn’t mean they have to benefit from the program if the parents don’t want them to. But if the parent is fine with them benefiting, no form, no sludge, zero.
And as a result of that program, according to a recent count, 15 million poor children — 15 million poor children — are benefiting from free school lunch and school breakfast. And while 15 million is a statistic, pause if you would over imagined faces of 15 of those children whose lives have been materially improved, not by an expensive educational campaign, not by a mandate, not by anything other than sludge removal.
Dark Patterns
Dark patterns are patterns of architecture online that end up exploiting people’s lack of information or behavioral biases to ensure that they end up buying things they really ought not to buy or that they part with something that matters to them without fully knowing what they’re getting into.
One of the less lovely facts of the last decades of research into behavioral science is that we now know more than we ever did about how to manipulate people. And that means that if you have a company that wants to make money at people’s expense, it can use sludge strategically to try to trap or trick them to lose money or sacrifice health and safety.
So here’s one example. A company might say, if you want to sign up for our product, which, let’s say, delivers you something every month at some expense, we’re going to make it so easy for you, it’s going to be a sludge-free experience. But if you want to stop subscribing to this product or this service, it’s going to be really hard. Sometimes to stop subscribing to an online service is a sludge-pervaded experience and people give up and they keep subscribing.
All over business life in countries all over the world, sludge is being used strategically to keep people engaged with a product or service, which it is not their interest to keep being engaged with. And it’s time, I think, in the 21st century, to recognize a right not to be manipulated. And often the method by which people are manipulated is through the selective imposition of sludge.