In our digital world, many everyday decisions are made online. Internet platforms are increasingly using technologies that intend to influence the decision-making of users in the interests of the company, so-called deceptive design patterns (DDPs). These occur as misleading language, emotional influence or visual deception. The effect of single DDPs on decision-making has been well documented by various studies¹. However, DDPs often occur in combination, frequently and repeatedly². This raises the question to what extent digital decision-making is influenced by the DDP itself, the sequential order of specific patterns or the overall time spent on a website?
To answer this, we conducted an experiment in which subjects were instructed to visit a website without responding to non-task-related offers (e.g. newsletter subscription). These offers appeared as frequent pop-ups with various DDPs to urge people into unintended actions. We measured the error rate (accepting non-task related offers) depending on the specific DDP, the sequential order (congruent vs. incongruent pattern before), and the duration of the experiment. First results indicate that specific DDPs significantly increase or decrease the error rate compared to the control condition and are discussed in the light of theoretical assumptions on digital decision-making.

¹European Commission (2022). Behavioural study on unfair commercial practices in the digital environment: Dark patterns and manipulative personalisation. Publications Office.
²Mathur, A., Acar, G., Friedman, M. J., Lucherini, E., Mayer, J., Chetty, M., & Narayanan, A. (2019). Dark Patterns at Scale. Proceedings of the ACM on HCI, 3(CSCW), 1–32.