Online bleaching as a harm reducing intervention

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Abstract: Online retailers use high-engagement website designs to improve product conversion. Gambling websites include three elements: linguistic content, functionality and experience design. Our research hypothesis is that gambling harms could be reduced via online 'bleaching' of page designs. This might involve the automatic conversion of colours to greys, reduction of movement, removal of sonic cues and the simplification of navigational structures to plain or alt text. Both the content (viz words and semantics) and procedural functionality would be unaffected. The presentation thereof however will be changed to remove salience and affect. We aim to show how bleaching affects subjects' neural mechanisms, emotions, autonomic balance and so their reactions. If robust, bleaching interventions could be enacted via easily distributed consumer-side technologies (such as browser plugins) or mandated via regulator imposed 'style sheets' for operators' vulnerable customer segments.  

Speakers:

Adrian Webb is a former FTSE 250 board director in financial services with GoCompare and Chair of both the London Digital Group, LAB, and the technology advisory service, OutcomePath. He is a PhD student at Exeter University and an investor/adviser with five successful UK start-ups in healthtech, fintech and the Arts.  At LAB, he was sponsor of two major research projects in 2019 conducted with City University of London into the online behavioural 'signatures' of vulnerable customers and problem gamblers. 

Dr Dimitris Pinotsis is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Mathematical Neuroscience and Psychology at City, University of London and head of the computational neuroscience and psychiatry lab. He is also a Research Affiliate at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Previously, he was a Senior Research Fellow at UCL’s Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging and a Senior Scientist at MIT. Dimitris holds a PhD and an MSc in Mathematics from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) of the University of Cambridge, UK. His research spans diverse areas including machine learning, the analysis of big data in neuroimaging, theoretical neurobiology and nonlinear systems in mathematical physics. 

 

Ade Webb

Dr Dimitris Pinotsis