Trained to accept?

Abstract

A typical consent dialog was shown in 2 x 2 x 3 experimental variations to 80,000 users of an online privacy tool. We find that polite requests and button texts pointing to a voluntary decision decrease the probability of consent---in contrast to findings in social psychology. Our data suggests that subtle positive effects of polite requests indeed exist, but stronger negative effects of heuristic processing dominate the aggregated results. Participants seem to be habituated to coercive interception dialogs---presumably due to ubiquitous EULAs---and blindly accept terms the more their presentation resembles a EULA. Response latency and consultation of online help were taken as indicators to distinguish more systematic from heuristic responses.