“Context can be stronger than reason and stronger than values. It can distort people’s perception of reality to such an extent that they can no longer see the ethical or legal dimension of their decision.” (13)

Thank you to NetGalley and Hachette Book Group for an Advanced Reader Copy of The Dark Pattern. This book is incredibly timely and important and there are points where it reals simultaneously like a manual for corporate ethics and also a self-help book (which I mean as a compliment). I even started wondering if this should also be advertised as a self-help book if it's not already. The examples used were compelling for their argument and I found I learned a lot more than what I had known previously about the scandals presented - especially the Uber case.

My biggest issue with the book was the introduction, I'm not sure it had the style or intrigue present in the rest of the book. This was quickly remedied in the following chapters.

I really enjoyed the callout boxes presented throughout the book. The boxes were helpful in reminding me the overarching concepts that the authors were pushing and I think that this should be a feature in other books of this style. The callout boxes also made me think that this could be a really cool way to interact with the book in a website format, almost like a choose your own adventure of "how many of these things do you see in your own work place."

(3.5 ★) The Dark Pattern is a meta-analysis of corporate scandals and wrongdoing, focusing on why and how the ostensibly otherwise decent people involved could do the things they did. The book is a sandwich of case studies of different corporations, surrounded by the framework with which the authors analyze them. The case studies focus, for the most part, on some of the more notable corporate scandals — Enron, Theranos, Wells Fargo, Boeing, etc. I felt that especially for those that have full books already written about them, the case study analysis in this book felt a little flat. I think that the chapters about the framework of analysis were probably the strongest in the book. Digging into the actual framework, I think that while it is useful, the authors’ application of it goes a step too far at times. It is one thing to say that there were contributing and mitigating factors to the Theranos scandal, and another entirely to say that there were no bad apples present.