Towards effective ethical behavior design
Rodrigo Cardoso de Oliveira, Juan Pablo Carrascal · 2014
Many of today's persuasive systems are designed taking into account cognitive biases to foster positive changes in people's behavior (e.g. adopt greener attitudes). However, these biases are also exploited to shape the users' behavior in a way that not necessarily benefit them (e.g. user retention in a website). Scholars addressed this problem by developing design guidelines and methods for ethics in persuasive computing, but these approaches alone have proved to be inefficient since they require every designer to be aware, understand, and comply with the recommended ethical practices. We propose preventive approaches that shall support higher compliance, as well as a remediation-based approach that does not require compliance from every designer. These approaches aim to help users understand persuasive elements embedded in systems, as well as to take more rational decisions when interacting with them. We expect that using preventive and remediation-based approaches will more effectively implement ethics in behavior design.