Prevalence and Characteristics of Manipulative Design in Mobile Applications Used by Children

Abstract

Manipulative design features (known as dark patterns) are common in video games and adult-directed technologies, but their prevalence in children's interactive media has not been described. To develop a reliable coding scheme for gathering data on manipulative digital designs, describe their prevalence within apps used by a community-based sample of young children, and test hypotheses about associations of manipulative design features with socioeconomic status (SES). This cross-sectional study of a convenience sample of parents of children aged 3 to 5 years was conducted online. Eligible parents were legal guardians of a 3-to-5-year-old child, lived with their child at least 5 days per week, understood English, and were part of a family that owned at least 1 Android or iOS tablet or smartphone. For each participant, the 3 apps used for the longest duration by children with their own mobile devices were downloaded, played, and coded. Data were analyzed between April and August 2021. Child SES, operationalized as parent educational attainment and household income-to-needs ratio. Researchers assigned each child a prevalence score for manipulative design features (overall, gameplay pressure, purchase pressure, and advertisement viewing pressure) within the apps children played. Of 160 children in the sample, mean (SD) age was 4.0 (0.6) years; 120 children (75.0%) were non-Hispanic White, and 96 (60.0%) had a parent with a college degree or more. Manipulative designs promoted prolonged gameplay or purchases through 4 user experience typologies: parasocial relationship pressure occurred in 33 (24.8%) and 25 (18.8%) apps with characters; time pressure in 23 (17.3%) and 14 (10.5%) apps; navigation constraints in 61 (45.9%) and 49 (36.8%) apps; and attractive lures in 60 (45.1%) and 61 (45.9%) apps, respectively. Children from households whose parents had lower education levels had higher manipulative design prevalence scores than children whose parents had graduated from college (median [IQR] 3.7 [2.5-5.0] vs 3.0 [2.0-4.0]; P = .02), gameplay-prolonging design (2.3 [1.6-3.0] vs 2.0 [1.5-2.8]; P = .047), and purchase pressure (1.0 [0.5-1.5] vs 0.6 [0-1.3]; P = .02). Purchase pressure prevalence scores were higher for children from households with lower income (R = -0.18; P = .02). Design features that encourage monetization of children's digital experiences were common in this sample and disproportionately occurred in apps used by children with lower SES.