It's not unethical to try to influence someone, even subconsciously, even by the choice of arbitrary design elements ("you start with 2 of 12 checked") -- as long as there's no deception.
In the simple case this is usually true, but I do wonder when you start throwing millions of dollars at researching exactly this sort of influence and start looking at pavlovian trigger mechanisms and stuff like that.
Most people aren't trained confidence tricksters, stage magicians or professional psychologists, but modern marketing at its most sophisticated is the combination of all three, backed with vast wealth and global reach, and it has already long gone beyond any pretence of acting as a way of informing people of things they might like to buy and has instead attempted, with a lot of success, to become the product itself. And, in case anyone was in doubt, I do not entirely regard this as a good thing.
In the simple case this is usually true, but I do wonder when you start throwing millions of dollars at researching exactly this sort of influence and start looking at pavlovian trigger mechanisms and stuff like that.
Most people aren't trained confidence tricksters, stage magicians or professional psychologists, but modern marketing at its most sophisticated is the combination of all three, backed with vast wealth and global reach, and it has already long gone beyond any pretence of acting as a way of informing people of things they might like to buy and has instead attempted, with a lot of success, to become the product itself. And, in case anyone was in doubt, I do not entirely regard this as a good thing.