Does Design Persuade or Manipulate?
Preface
In my journey of learning UX out of spite, I stumbled across "lawsofux.com," recommended by two separate instances and almost ubiquitous in search results. I find the website to be a poorly disguised storefront for selling posters, and a shoddy attempt at being a tertiary source (most references lead to either wikipedia or medium articles).
When searching for common UX pitfalls, one trend became clear, Dark Patterns. Without going into the website into much detail, this phrase is used to describe deceptive, manipulative, and malicious tactics employed in UI/UX.
Jumping off this phrase, I searched for more instances of UX/UI being used to deceive and stumbled across a short opinion piece. Cennydd bowles writes:
"Design influences. It persuades. But if it manipulates, something’s wrong."
That got me thinking, with my background in linguistics (and multimodal discourse analysis in my toolkit) plus a skeptical eye for everything to do with corporate design and advertising, I wanted to dig deeper into the difference between persuasion and manipulation in design (if any). Surely, if there are profit motives behind the screen, one must tread very skeptically, no?
Part 1: The Easy Part
Several [1][2][3][4][5] sources define manipulation as something done with malicious intent, obfuscation of the persuader's actual goals, and loss of autonomy of the persuadee through guilt, pressure, or other unfair tactics.
If you look at the "deceptive patterns" website, you can find a quote from Cass Sunstein*:
"It should be clear that an action does not count as manipulative merely because it is an effort to alter people’s behavior. (...) A calorie label and an energy efficiency label are not ordinarily counted as forms of manipulation. So long as a private or public institution is informing people, or “just providing the facts,” it is hard to complain of manipulation. There is also a large difference between persuading people and manipulating them. With (non-manipulative) persuasion, people are given facts and reasons, presented in a sufficiently fair and neutral way; manipulation is something different"
Reading the full paper, in the concluding paragraph he writes:
"Some arguable forms of manipulation are mild, as when a politician, an employer, or a waiter uses loss aversion, tone of voice, and facial expressions to encourage certain decisions. Thus defined, manipulation is a pervasive feature of human life. It is for this reason that while the legal system is generally able to handle lies and deception, it has a much harder time in targeting manipulation"
Sunstein is more concerned about the legal ramifications of manipulation, and goes on to say that there are "mild" types of manipulation that are not outright deceptive. Though "manipulation is everywhere" feels like a non-answer, to read more about it, I revisited an old framework friend of mine.
Part 2: The Hard Part
In "Persuasion and Manipulation," Rom Harré analyzes scientific discourse using the framework of persuasion and manipulation. He states:
"In a general I will be trying to show that while concepts like 'persuasion' and 'manipulation' are distinctive morally, the persuasive discourses of the 'orators' engaged in these morally distinctive projects have certain features in common."
After a lengthy but packed setup, Harré concludes with an analysis of psychology rhetoric. Harré criticizes "the (psychological) scientific mode" for viewing their patients as, not individual free-thinkers, but in his own words, automata. He continues:
"Even if people display autonomy in the social events called 'experiments', the use of a scientistic rhetoric to describe them prevents that autonomy being registered, so to speak. Creative or novel moves in the face of the problem set by the experimenter, must be treated not as authentic free action, but as confirmation or disconfirmation of a priori hypothesis. In some cases free action is treated as statistical variation. The experiment, then, and its associated rhetoric, is the expression of an essentially reactionary attitude to social life. Divorced from that attitude an experiment hardly makes sense as a way of studying how people produce social actions."
He brings up J. Turner's "analysis" regarding discrimination within a group. Turner maps this discrimination onto a "behavioural continuum" from F to FAV, with FAV being the most discriminatory. Harré then makes a point, that this attitude undermines the autonomy of the people Turner studies. He theorizes, were people to adopt Turner's way of thinking, they would simply accept this "scientific result" and adopt a "passive conservatism" dictated by turner's continuum.
He concludes that through "relexicalization," folk-psychology is painted with a coat of "scientistic vocabulary." (i.e. science-ing up your statements) And social psychologists, though wanting to persuade using rhetoric, might actually end up manipulating.
Part 3: Wait... something about UX?
Let's go back to lawsofux.com. There, let's pick a random example, Jakob's Law.
Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know. (emphasis mine)
Since the phrase was coined within Nielsen Norman (NN), the references mostly point to their website. But let's apply what we've just learned from Harré onto this UX "guide."
If you click on the first link on that page, you'll eventually be redirected to an 8-year-old youtube video by the NN group. Jakob Nielsen, the host, says something telling
"Jakob's Law of the Internet User Experience is not a law like what they're debating in Parliament (...) It's not something voted on by politicians. It's not even something that I decided on. Jakob's Law just describes how things are. It's more like a law of nature." (emphasis mine)
Right there. THAT'S some relexicalization. The normalization and undermining of individual autonomy to serve a hypothesis. Neilsen is even more brazen in that he does not assert his theory as a hypothesis, instead framing it as "a law of nature."
Which brings us to the main question I set out to ask, is all design manipulation?
If you've been following along (and reading the references), you'll understand that undermining human autonomy could be as subtle as framing something in scientific terms, leveraging the scientific method to parade something else as irrefutable.
When you step back and see much of UX "designing" (frankly there is some overlap with UI in this regard but I digress), many "principles" are founded on heuristics and "laws" that are phrased in a way to naturalize human biases.
Another example is the aesthetic-usability effect.
Summary: Users believe that designs that look good also work well, and UX should take advantage of this. But don't make aesthetic usability lead you astray as a designer, because the UI must actually work well for long-term success.
Is this not manipulation shrouded in an air of persuasion? Undermining human autonomy and finding a gap in this "effect"? One could argue that the very foundations of design and how humans "interact" with systems are treated as automata. UX's foundation being psychology also doesn't help in its attitudes towards trying to "nudge" human actions through "experiments" (or "user testing").
Summary
Beyond simple persuasion and manipulation, there are layers to this Discourse. With much of the human-centered design ethos that UX purports, it's good to re-evaluate "Design" as a framework. Are users given agency to steer designs, or are their relationship to the subject matter treated as merely causal? If design truly claims to persuade (and not manipulate,) how do you ensure the end-user is not acting in service of a metric or hypothesis?
But what does this actually mean? Am I saying that all design and UX/UI is bad and therefore morally corrupt and all UX designers should quit their jobs and move to the countryside and work at a dairy farm?
Yes.
Footnotes
*Cass Sunstein, as I only realized after reading and typing this all out, is one of the people behind the book "Nudge." Which isn't a good book, but there is a good podcast talking about how bad of a book it is.
**That last part is a JOKE.