Why Aren't We Talking About Ethical Leadership When We Talk About Dark Patterns?

We've been talking about dark patterns and customer deceptions a lot more lately than we used to. Customers continue to experience dark patterns (we've probably all fallen for a dark pattern at least once). Regulators and courts are increasingly evaluating how companies deploy them. Big fines against companies for deceiving customers are becoming more frequent, after long court battles.

Dark patterns aren't on the periphery of customer experience. They're now common. One study found 1,818 dark patterns across ~11,000 shopping websites, 183 websites that engaged in deceptive practices and 22 third-party entities that provided a turnkey ability to create and implement dark patterns on websites. Two of those openly advertised their deceptive messaging services.

Researchers have cataloged dark patterns design techniques like:

• Roach motel – Signing up is easy, but canceling requires multiple steps, phone calls, or navigating confusing menus.

• Hidden costs – Fees, surcharges, or subscriptions show up late in the checkout process after customers have already invested time.

• Confirmshaming – Customers are pressured through guilt-inducing language, such “No thanks, I don’t want to save money” when declining an offer.

• False urgency – Fake countdown timers that create FOMO (fear of missing out) pressure to make a purchase before the opportunity supposedly disappears.

We also have more information than ever about the potential customer harms:

• Privacy loss

• Autonomy loss

• Time consumption

• Cognitive stress

• Emotional distress

• Financial loss

• Addiction

• Social injustice

Yet one question remains oddly absent from dark patterns discourse:

Where are the organizational leaders?

The prevailing discourse usually treats dark patterns as features of interfaces, websites, apps, or companies. Organizations deploy dark patterns. Platforms implement them for profit-related purposes.

But human decision-makers behind dark patterns seem to disappear from view. With that, so does a long overdue conversation on ethical leadership and dark patterns.

We all recognize unethical leadership: financial fraud, discrimination, retaliation, corruption, or harassment. Here, the connection between ethics and customer, employee, and stakeholder harm feels obvious. Someone approved the behavior, permitted it, ignored it, or created conditions that allowed it.

The same is true for dark patterns, and we know it now. Cases against Amazon, Adobe, and Epic Games spell it out in court documents. Someone decides that cancellation should require more effort than enrollment. Someone determines that friction imposed on customers is justified if it benefits revenue creation.

Yet, dark patterns somehow escape ethical leadership scrutiny. Why? We just don't have enough research on that yet. But we do know from research that the final decision-makers usually aren't designers; they're organizational leaders.

The next evolution of the dark patterns debate should not be another taxonomy of deceptive practices. We already know a great deal about how companies manipulate customers.

A more pressing question is whether organizations create conditions where someone can successfully object. In the Epic Games case, Fortnite designers tried to flag potential customer harms to company executives, but were not granted permission to change the game design and permissions. At least not at first. Most of the customers in this case were children and their parents.

Customer experience leaders often recognize these tensions first. They understand where friction has been intentionally introduced, where disclosures have been strategically minimized, and where customer interests have been deprioritized in favor of sales and profit.

Yet recognizing a problem and having the authority to challenge it are not the same thing.

Ethical leadership, viewed through this lens, is not only about preventing deceptive design. It is about ensuring that those closest to the customer have enough influence to challenge it, and be heard. Ethical leadership, after all, depends on ethical followership.

But the conversation, at least, where organizational leader decision-making takes center stage, must move into the mainstream.

Find my book on the Sage Publishing website, and follow me on LinkedIn.