Evaluation of an Interviewer as a Function of Interviewer Gaze, Reinforcement of Subject Gaze, and Interviewer Attractiveness

54 male undergraduates were interviewed by female interviewers who gazed constantly, intermittently, or not at all. Experimental Ss were reinforced with green light feedback whenever they gazed at the interviewers and were punished with red light feedback when they averted gaze for more than 6 sec. Control Ss received noncontingent green and red light feedback. Although gaze of experimental Ss toward the interviewers was increased significantly, their attitudes toward the interviewers remained the same. This was probably because the Ss did not discriminate that their gazing behavior had changed. Ss gave the most unfavorable reactions to the nongazing interviewers, rating them as least attractive, giving them the shortest answers, and sitting farthest from them during the debriefing session. Ss did not discriminate between high- and low-attractive interviewers, except that the latter were rated disproportionately low on attentiveness if they did not gaze. Interviewers with high rates of talking were preferred over interviewers with low rates of talking

UI Dark Patterns and Where to Find Them A Study on Mobile Applications and User Perception

A Dark Pattern (DP) is an interface maliciously crafted to deceive users into performing actions they did not mean to do. In this work, we analyze Dark Patterns in 240 popular mobile apps and conduct an online experiment with 589 users on how they perceive Dark Patterns in such apps. The results of the analysis show that 95% of the analyzed apps contain one or more forms of Dark Patterns and, on average, popular applications include at least seven different types of deceiving interfaces. The online experiment shows that most users do not recognize Dark Patterns, but can perform better in recognizing malicious designs if informed on the issue. We discuss the impact of our work and what measures could be applied to alleviate the issue