Digital Psychology | Hacker News Reader

Digital Psychology

digitalpsychology.io

57 pointsvenmul27 comments

"A free library of psychological principles and examples for inspiration to enhance the customer experience and connect with your users."

Translation: use pop psychology to manipulate your customers into spending money and giving you personal information.

The site is about blatant manipulation through digital media which are called 'dark patterns' it's not 'digital psychology'

People who call it "digital psychology" are probably trying to tell themselves that it's OK to do this stuff and that they're not the baddies.

Possibly, they might also think the only purpose or use of psychology is for that effect. I'm studying psychology in my spare time and it is an amazing tool for unlocking human potential. The only reason to know about 'dark patterns' is to grow up and find better ways to capture value through digital media by actually doing something for the user.

> The only reason

Are you certain _you_ have divined _the_ only reason already?

In your _spare time_.

I don't really click with what you're saying. It sounds like a riddle to me.

To be clearer I could have said 'the only good reason'. Implying any other use that I can think of (while lucrative) is nefarious.

Relevant link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3400899.3400901

"Although they have recently burst into mainstream awareness, dark patterns are the result of three decades-long trends: one from the world of retail (deceptive web services practices), one from research and public policy (nudging), and the third from the design community (growth hacking)."

Yes, this is literally hacking of the mind. These people should be thrown in jail like blackhat hackers.

logic applied abstractly leads to maths, maths applied to our surroundings leads to physics, physics applied to our ideas leads to engineering. now let's repeat the process for psychology and enjoy our new engineering discipline, manipulation for everyone. unsurprising. at some point it becomes easier to hack human responses than improve the products. we used to call this scamming. now it's business 101. please join, like and subscribe.

sorry for the cynical take, can't help it once a day

Reading this comment is an experiment in self-hacking. I'm the only human I know who even considers giving informed consent like the previous statement, much less currently does it. People probably don't because it's true for everything in the world; we're all programming each other and ourselves all the time.

It's time to mainstream discussions of what white-/grey-hat human hacking looks like.

For me, it looks like changing my name to Peacefully Revoking Consent To Be Governed For You And For All, establishing a party & Super PAC for dismantling the United States of America, and running for president as the first openly genderfluid, pansexual, and polyamorous candidate on a platform of recognizing as individual nations all persons who want to be recognized as one, dynamically redesigning governance at the point of interaction with any person/nation (when they want to revoke consent to be governed), creating continuous elections and removing all voting restrictions (especially based on age or felonies), and promising to veto any legislation not applying category theory to prove the law meets all needs while denying none.

I hope the campaign helps to usher in a new era of people more intentionally hacking themselves and others for the creation of sustainable cultures. And for people to start learning how to protect against dark patterns.

Yes, we are all programming each other and ourselves all the time. You are not the only human with this kind of concerns. When I was younger, I avoided giving my opinion in many cases because I didn't know if it was ok to do that, as it might change the views of other people in ways that I didn't feel would always be positive for them. As I grew up, I noticed it didn't matter that much, as people are very resilient to changing their minds; their emotional perspective and priorities dominate their views, not their rational considerations.

In any case, while knowing where to draw the line is extremely hard, it's obvious there has to be a line, and publically sharing your opinion without any hidden motive is fundamentally different from attempting to lead others in a path that benefits your interests without regards for how that affects others or how it differs from your genuinely perceived truth (manipulation).

Keep in mind, anyone who seriously took this idea and ran with it...

Was swiftly put to death.

Yeah. I'm inviting BIPOC to come forward and run with the platform. I'll drop out of they ask. Until then, I'm working on an "In case of death/martyrdom" set of instructions.

You previous comment tickled the hell out of me, btw.

I’ve been saying, for at least a decade:

I’ll move to whichever country has the first poor transgendered pregnant black wrongly incarcerated, death-row female Scottish heroin addict meth dealer pedophile priest insect from another planet as its leader.

Until then, I can’t take politics seriously as it’s run my normal people right across the board, all the way up and down.

My partner and I have a 20-month old. I promote psychedelic therapy (and all other forms of self-hacking). I'm a priest/abbottess of a design-your-own-religion religion I've defined based on neuroscience such that we're all practicing it, supposedly have Scottish heritage somewhere back in my blood (but am mostly Cajun French). I'm recovering from many addictions. I've developed the platform, in part, by envisioning a future I want to live in, identifying what I'd be like there, and adopting aspects of that being, so I'm from the future. I was raised in toxic cultures that led to drunken hookups and violating sexual boundaries in ways that don't seem to be illegal and if I get any kind of attention I'm prepared for my own #MeToo moment. And I'm promoting a new currency you create by painting $1 bills black, asking for a need to be met, documenting the story of the ask & gift on the bill, and giving it to the person who met your needs...I call it the "nuff" and I think it may be a felony to make one.

So the time for you to take politics seriously (which I consider to the old way of relating to politics) may be upon you soon...and I hope you'll join me in this big political practical (as in useful) joke.

I'm Peacefully Revoking Consent To Be Governed For You And For All, I'm programming my mind by asking WWJD (What would Jokratesus [Joker + Socrates + Jesus] do?), and I approve this message.

(That's an abstract emoticon that has at least 3 "faces" depending on the angle viewed from)

I propose we keep tickling each other like this and see what other ideas emerge.

There isn't enough cynicism on this planet for statements on sales psychology.

Where do you draw the line? Should we also throw all sales people in jail that use most of the same techniques during negotiation?

Maybe not all of them.

Criminals are necessary for a healthy functioning society.

Can you give some examples of what would go wrong with no criminals?

What kind of world do you imagine has no criminals?

Sounds horrifying!

You’d have to either be ignoring deviation, or genuinely homogeneous.

There are no examples of this in nature: there are always outliers, there’s always a gradient.

Another page discussing the concepts without touching on the fact the old studies that showed them were deeply flawed and not reproduced...

I think this is should be said, and people should never take these as dogmas, or "the wires to be pulled to manipulate people".

That's not how it works, and that's not how WE work.

It was one of the things when I switched from CS to Marketing degree, was that there's nothing set in stone with regards to psychology, and that's why you have people that follow some "thinkers" and why there's no human psychology manual to program us.

Any example on that?

I wonder if/how AI personal agents would be able to help in this regard, trained to spot when attention is being manipulated in a certain way and inform you of that. Like the sunk cost fallacy, which is also in that list, it can offer you a warning like: "You are entering a step by step procedure, this can trick your mind into finalizing the purchase even if you are not very committed yet." - or something like: "Prices and quantities in this list seem to be manipulated in a way that tricks your mind into buying more than you actually need." and similar like these.

> I wonder if/how AI personal agents would be able to help in this regard, trained to spot when attention is being manipulated

Yeah that gave me a chuckle.

Vastly more likely outcome will be any more advanced technology we create will be used to identify that we could be manipulated more.

Given that is all we have thus far done with any advanced technology we have created, it seems reasonable that we will continue on this same path.

Unless we are acted upon by some significant force.

It looks like this site got digi tech'd.

I was reading a nice refresher on anchoring, the page refreshed and it was gone.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/anchoring-and-adjustmen...

This is an explosion of red flags that should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

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