Your users brains are 200k years out of date

Behavioural design can reduce friction or turn it into a trap. The difference is who benefits.

I’ve spent a large part of my career in windowless rooms with senior executives and startup founders convinced their product was failing because users were stupid.

The users were not stupid.

They were busy, uncertain, distracted and trying to avoid making a decision they would regret. The product expected them to behave like a spreadsheet with a pulse. Behavioural economics gave product teams a better explanation. People pay attention to defaults. They judge prices against reference points. They look to other people when the decision feels risky. They may work harder to avoid a loss than to secure an equivalent gain.

Then marketers did what marketers do. We turned useful research into a bag of tricks.

Conversion is low? Add urgency. Upgrades are slow? Make the free version painful. Customers are cancelling? Hide the button behind six screens and a short oral examination.

The phrase Stone Age brain became a convenient excuse. It made the customer sound defective and the growth team sound like anthropologists. Human judgement is shaped by context, but the effects are not universal switches.

Research on choice overload, for example, has found large differences between situations and an average effect close to zero across one major review. More options can confuse people. They can also help when the choices are organised well and the buyer understands what they want.

Loss aversion has the same problem. The idea that losses can matter more than equivalent gains remains influential, but there is no universal multiplier that belongs on every pricing page. The frequently repeated figure of 2.25 came from earlier estimates. A 2024 review found a much smaller average estimate and serious variation across the underlying studies.

The useful lesson is simpler.

Product design changes the context in which people decide.

A default can save effort. Preselecting the safest privacy setting may protect someone who has no reason to change it. Preselecting a paid add on and hoping they miss it uses the same mechanism for a different beneficiary. Defaults have influenced decisions even in serious settings such as organ donation, which is precisely why companies should treat them with care.

An anchor can make value easier to understand. Showing the cost of the current manual process beside the price of automation can help a buyer compare two real options. Inventing a bad pricing tier purely to push people towards the expensive one is not customer insight. Anchoring is a recognised feature of judgement under uncertainty, but the existence of an effect does not settle whether a company should exploit it.

Social proof can reduce uncertainty when it is relevant and verifiable. A case study from a company with the same constraints helps a buyer understand risk. A wall of customer logos from companies that barely used the product is decoration wearing a lanyard.

This is where behavioural design becomes a trust decision.

A free plan can place clear limits around storage, usage or advertising. The user understands the trade. A product that traps personal files, makes downgrading painful or turns cancellation into an obstacle course is doing something else. It is using friction to prevent a decision the customer has already made.

Regulators call many of these tactics dark patterns. These designs can improve a conversion metric while creating complaints, refunds, support costs and customers who remember exactly how the company behaved when they tried to leave.

The cleanest test is not whether the tactic works. Plenty of bad things work for a while.

Ask what happens when the user fully understands the design. Would they still make the same choice? Can they reverse it without punishment? Does the default reflect their likely interest, or the company’s preferred revenue line? Would you explain the mechanism openly in the product copy?

Good behavioural design helps people complete an intention. It reduces unnecessary effort, makes consequences clear and puts the important information where the decision happens. It respects the fact that customers have limited time and attention.

Bad behavioural design creates the outcome the company wants while relying on the customer misunderstanding, overlooking or giving up.

That difference matters because growth teams rarely see the full cost immediately. The experiment reports a higher upgrade rate. It does not show the customer who now distrusts the company, the support agent handling the complaint or the future sale lost in a private conversation.

Use psychology to make the decision clearer.

The customer’s consent should survive the design.

See you out there.

Martin