Investigating Responsible Nudge Design for Informed Decision-Making Enabling Transparent and Reflective Decision-Making

Consent interfaces are habitually designed to coerce people into sharing the maximum amount of data, rather than making decisions that align with their intentions and privacy attitudes, by leveraging cognitive biases to nudge users toward certain decision outcomes through interface design. Reflection and transparency have been proposed as two design dimensions of a choice architecture constituting a responsible nudge approach capable of counteracting these mechanisms by prompting reflected choice. In a crowdsourced experiment, we evaluate these capabilities of a proposed data-disclosure consent interface design deploying the responsible nudge approach within a realistic setting by exploiting a status quo bias during the sign-up of an online survey platform as a secondary task within a crowdsourcing context. Our results provide insights into a responsible design of consent interfaces, suggesting that prompting reflection significantly decreases the discrepancy between users’ privacy attitudes and decision outcomes. Meanwhile, making the presence of a nudge transparent had no significant effect on its influence. Furthermore, identifying individuals’ attitudes as a significant predictor of privacy behavior provides a promising direction for future research.