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In my first book, Hooked, I have a whole section about the morality of manipulation. And that chapter was really for the individual product designer to ask themselves, what’s an ethical use of their own human capital? But then there’s this other question around how organizations can design products ethically. And so I looked for some kind of test that we can use as product designers to make sure that we use these techniques for good. I started out with Google’s motto of “Don’t be evil,” but that didn’t really work because it’s so subjective. Then I heard from the lawyers and the lawyers said, “Disclosure. Just tell people what you’re going to do and that’s how you make sure that your bases are covered.” But that’s not really a good standard either, because we know what people do with those terms of service, they just flick right through them, nobody actually reads them. So, then I heard about the golden rule, which says, “Do unto unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But that’s also not the proper standard, because who’s to say that we as the designers know what we should do to our users?
So, instead, what we should use is the regret test. The regret test says that we bring in a representative sample of users — and by the way, this is something the tech industry has done for decades and decades, it’s called “user testing” — and this regret test is a fantastic way to screen out unethical business practices. And we show them the user flow and we ask them if they would regret using the product knowing everything that we, as the designer, know. And the reason this is so valuable is because it’s much better to test a potentially unethical business practice before it’s launched than after it’s launched and we get all this bad blowback.
Because the lesson here to understand is not that behavioral design tactics themselves are unethical, it’s how they are applied. If you are using a tactic to help people learn a language or save money or exercise more, I would argue behavioral design and habit formation is wonderful. We want to get people hooked to these healthy habits, but of course, if people use a product and then later regret the use of that product because of some unethical practice, well, not only is that unethically not a good thing, it’s also really bad for business, because people don’t like using a product that they later regret. Not only do they stop using it, they tell all their friends over social media to stop doing business with a company as well. So, simply having this test of, “Hey, I think we should run a regret test on that and bring in a representative sample to see would people regret using the product knowing everything the product designer knows,” is a very simple easy way for us to make sure that we are designing these products for good.