SYLVIE DOUGLIS, BYLINE: NPR.
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ADRIAN MA, HOST:
Back in the fall of 2020, Ron Majury (ph) wanted to donate some of his money to political campaigns. Like it or not, he says, campaigns run on cash.
RON MAJURY: They need money in order to get the message out and to drive votes.
DARIAN WOODS, HOST:
Ron lives in Florida. He’s an entrepreneur and a Republican. So he went online and found the typical calls to action.
MAJURY: Donate – we have to win; we have to save the country – you know, the whole spiel.
MA: And Ron remembers donating a few thousand bucks in one-off contributions to a few political campaigns. But later on, he got an alert from his credit card company saying that these campaigns wanted to charge him more – around $20,000 more.
MAJURY: I don’t want to say I was upset, but I was definitely concerned that they could do that so easily.
WOODS: Pretty philosophical for $20,000 he’s not expecting.
MA: Oh, (inaudible).
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MA: This is THE INDICATOR FROM PLANET MONEY. I’m Adrian Ma.
WOODS: And I’m Darian Woods. A recent study finds that some political campaigns have raised millions of dollars from people who didn’t even intend to donate that money. It’s all thanks to a very subtle design tweak. It’s something that we run into all the time in everyday life.
MA: So today on the show, we’ll talk to the researchers behind that study about the power of something they call dark defaults. And we’ll learn what Ron did about that surprise 20 grand credit card charge.
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MA: The reason that Ron was being charged $20,000 for donations that he did not even remember making is that he didn’t see the box. A little prechecked box on the donation page of these political fundraising websites that essentially said, make my donation a weekly recurring donation.
WOODS: This prechecked box, this opt-in by default, isn’t unique to political fundraising websites. You know, it’s all over the internet, and you’ve probably been caught by some version of it yourself. You know, like you log into a website once, and suddenly you’re getting a flood of promotional emails. Or you sign up for the free one-week trial of some subscription service, only later to be surprised when you get a bill for the deluxe forever plan.
MA: Yeah, even smarty-pants researchers from Columbia University are not immune to this.
ERIC JOHNSON: I just spent a large part of my day unsubscribing from websites that I’m pretty convinced I never subscribed to.
NATE POSNER: Yeah, I’m right there with Eric. My inbox is a disaster.
MA: That’s Eric Johnson, a professor of marketing, and Nate Posner, a Ph.D. candidate. Nate says all these are everyday examples of what they call dark defaults. And the idea here is similar to the concept of dark patterns, which we’ve talked about on the show before. Dark patterns are these ways of designing websites and apps to essentially trick people into doing something. Dark defaults fall under that same umbrella because they’re subtle changes to the default settings on a website.
WOODS: Studying the effects of dark defaults can be difficult when they’re used by private companies that don’t want to share their data. But political campaigns, by law, have to make donor information publicly available. And that trove of data gave Eric and Nate an idea. They downloaded millions of donor records to understand how dark defaults are used in political fundraising. They wanted to know who was using these and how effective were they.
POSNER: And what we found was that about half of the top Republicans had this prechecked checkbox on their webpage that if you didn’t notice it, then your donation would repeat every week.
MA: So if a donor pledged $100 on day one, by default, they would be opted into donating $100 the next week and the next and the next. Nate says he found this prechecked box tactic deployed on eight different Republican fundraising websites, some associated with the campaign to reelect Donald Trump for the Republican National Committee and a few others for Republican Senate candidates.
POSNER: The Democrats didn’t do it to the same degree from what we could see.
JOHNSON: They might have done it. It just wasn’t as systematic. We couldn’t see it.
POSNER: Exactly. Yeah, it wasn’t nearly as systematic.
WOODS: So for this study, they focused on those Republican fundraising sites. And the first question that they asked was whether presenting donors with a default prechecked box made a difference in the amount of money that a campaign raised. And the answer was, yes, it does.
MA: By making this very subtle tweak, the campaigns raised about 43 million more dollars than they would have otherwise. That equals about 11% of the total that they raised.
WOODS: That’s a very good return on your tweak.
MA: Yeah, not a subtle increase in cash.
POSNER: It’s a big effect, just a couple of lines of code. And the return, given that, I think is extremely large. It’s not the majority of the money that these campaigns raised, but it is tens of millions of dollars in races that are decided by less than that.
JOHNSON: And let me make a comparison. Imagine someone walked into your campaign and said, I’m going to give you a $43 million gift. That would be a big deal. And by making these small change, they got that $43 million gift – except not from one person, from hundreds of thousands of people.
MA: OK, so this default prechecked box significantly increased the amount of money campaigns took in. But the next question was – how much of this was actually intended by the donors?
POSNER: Defaults work for a lot of different reasons. And so this default likely worked because some people saw it, and they thought, oh, maybe I do want to set up weekly recurring donations. Some people thought, oh, this will be more convenient. But then there are – there’s probably some subgroup of that people who didn’t see it at all.
WOODS: The challenge is knowing which is which. The researchers had records for some 15 million donations. I mean, they could call up donors and ask, did you mean to give all that money?
MA: Yeah. And some awkward phone calls, no less.
WOODS: And many phone calls as well.
MA: (Laughter) Yeah, that’s right. So instead, they decided to focus on repeat donors who asked for refunds because think about it – donors asking for their money back suggests that they did not intend to donate all that money in the first place. And it turns out when fundraising sites made these weekly recurring donations the default, those who got defaulted in requested twice as much money in refunds compared to those who were not.
JOHNSON: So defaults work lots of ways, but one of the ways they can work is by fooling people. And we think that in this case, some people were fooled.
WOODS: Some people might say, well, the donors should be more careful. But Nate and Eric say that the responsibility should be placed on those collecting the money.
POSNER: I think in general, donors should be aware of exactly what they’re committing to give at the moment that they’re doing it. And I think right now there are many ways to make it so donors aren’t.
JOHNSON: So there is a deeper and more fundamental question here, which is many of these people are actually responsible for doing the people’s business. They want to have people’s trust. And why that doesn’t extend to their campaign websites seems to be a bit of a mystery. If you want my trust, don’t fool me.
MA: And they say one more thing to consider here is that those who tend to get, quote-unquote, “fooled” by these dark defaults are small-dollar donors. And maybe they got fooled because they’re less experienced with the process of giving or maybe because the amounts they’re giving are just less noticeable when they get charged for them more than once.
WOODS: Of course, our guy in Florida, Ron, who was hit with a $20,000 surprise bill, he wasn’t a small-dollar donor, but he does worry about them.
MAJURY: Let’s say that someone donates $10 a month. They’re not even looking at that. You know what I mean?
MA: Yeah. Like, a $10 charge on a credit card bill, a lot of people might not even notice that until it’s been already many weeks later. Now, Ron obviously was dealing with a much bigger charge, and he did notice. And so what he did next was contact WinRed, which is a Republican fundraising platform. He says they were pretty good about refunding his money quickly, but the whole experience still left a kind of sour taste in his mouth.
MAJURY: I thought that it was not the right thing to do. I thought that it was unethical.
WOODS: Some policymakers agree. State and federal legislators have proposed banning prechecked boxes on fundraising websites.
MAJURY: So I would 1,000% support that bill. No one is above getting scammed – how’s that? I don’t care how smart you are or what you do or – we’re all in the same boat.
MA: And it’s a big boat. By the way, we reached out to WinRed and the various campaigns highlighted in this study. They did not return our request for comment.
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MA: This episode was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler and engineered by Neal Rauch. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Kate Concannon edits the show. And THE INDICATOR’s a production of NPR.
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