Evil by Design: Interaction design to lead us into temptation

Gluttony

Too soon, too expensively, too much, too eagerly, too daintily.

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1274

Gluttony occurs when we over-consume to the point of extravagance or waste. Historically gluttony was seen as a major sin (it distracted people from their religious observances), but today it’s almost as if gluttony is expected in Western culture. We demonstrate our wealth by showing an overabundance of “stuff.”

Companies encourage this overabundance by making us feel like we deserve to be rewarded and by escalating our level of commitment beyond what we first intended, drawing us in from early engagement through to full-on compliance. Sites also make us fearful of missing out—scarcity, exclusivity, and loss aversion play on the fears behind gluttony.

Deserving our rewards

We are easily fooled into gluttony. Just having healthy options available on menus or among the selections from a vending machine is sometimes enough to make our brains think we’ve satisfied our health and nutrition goals, and therefore have permission to choose less honorable options.

The average restaurant meal in the United States is four times larger now than it was in the 1950s, yet we might still be fitting into the same size clothes as we always have—not because we’ve stayed slim, but because our clothes have grown. Not in the sense of Betabrand’s gluttony pants, which have three waistline buttons labeled piglet, sow, and boar “to accommodate waistline expansion during feeding time,” but ...