The ethics of nudging depend on how it is used and for what purpose. In general, nudging can be seen as ethical as long as it is trans­par­ent, does not manip­u­late or deceive con­sumers, and respects their auton­o­my and freedom of choice. Nudges need to be designed in a way that does not take advan­tage of con­sumers or exploit their vulnerabilities.

However, there are also con­cerns about the poten­tial for nudging to be used to further the inter­ests of com­pa­nies or gov­ern­ments at the expense of con­sumers. For example, there may be con­cerns about the use of nudges to influ­ence con­sumer behav­ior in ways that are not in their best inter­ests, such as by steer­ing them towards prod­ucts or ser­vices that are not the most ben­e­fi­cial for them.

To ensure that nudging is used eth­i­cal­ly, it is impor­tant for there to be clear guide­lines and reg­u­la­tions in place to govern its use and to ensure that it is not abused. It is also impor­tant for con­sumers to be aware of how they may be influ­enced by nudges so that they can make informed deci­sions about their own behavior.

The effects are tiny, but they can be mea­sured and are sta­tis­ti­cal­ly rel­e­vant nev­er­the­less. A tiny change that impacts mil­lions of people is still a big one in the end.

Gorilla enables you to quickly adapt classic behav­ioral research tasks to improve the per­for­mance of your brand. For example, Implic­it Asso­ci­a­tion Tasks (IATs) are a pow­er­ful way for brands to gain insight into how con­sumers think and feel about their prod­ucts. By using IATs, brands can measure how quickly a con­sumer asso­ciates certain words and images with their brand, as well as how strong­ly they asso­ciate spe­cif­ic attrib­ut­es with the brand. This can be used to iden­ti­fy oppor­tu­ni­ties for improve­ment, as well as to assess how suc­cess­ful a brand’s current mar­ket­ing and adver­tis­ing efforts are. Brands can also use IATs to measure the impact of changes in their prod­ucts and ser­vices on con­sumer beliefs, atti­tudes, and behav­iors. This research can be used to inform deci­sions about how to best posi­tion their prod­ucts rel­a­tive to com­pet­ing solu­tions, opti­mize their mar­ket­ing strate­gies, and ensure their prod­ucts are meeting cus­tomer needs.

Of course, Gorilla offers the usual surveys, but it also lets you add con­di­tion­al flows or connect to any other of our tools. That includes tra­di­tion­al psy­chol­o­gy tasks, mul­ti­play­er exper­i­ments, gam­i­fied tasks, or on- and offline shop­ping sim­u­la­tions. We measure reac­tion times, eye move­ment, and key­board and mouse inputs and can record audio and video.

Behav­ioral con­sumer research using sim­u­la­tion tools like Gorilla Shop Builder are valid, even if par­tic­i­pants don’t use real money to make real pur­chas­ing deci­sions. The research can still provide useful insights into how people make deci­sions and what factors influ­ence their deci­sion-making because it’s the best approx­i­ma­tion short of mea­sur­ing real-life behav­ior. Gorilla Shop Builder is suf­fi­cient­ly eco­log­i­cal­ly valid to provide insights at a scale and cost that would­n’t be pos­si­ble in the field.

Of course. That’s what Gorilla Studio is for. Trained behav­ioral sci­en­tists can design and/or imple­ment your par­a­digm and deliver cleaned data as well as basic analy­sis to your inbox.

It’s simple: Oppor­tu­ni­ty cost and allo­ca­tion of resources. A tested and proven solu­tion already exists — the Gorilla Experiment Builder. Each hour you ded­i­cate to build­ing a custom behav­ioral science toolsets like ours could be devoted to serving (and billing) your clients instead. Half a dozen devel­op­ers and design­ers work on con­tin­u­al­ly improv­ing Gorilla: Imagine the costs of coding even a frac­tion of our functionality.

Gorilla is designed specif­i­cal­ly for this kind of research and records all the right mea­sures. Plus it’s fully sup­port­ed so your team and you won’t get stuck. Gorilla itself is used by people all over the world, so we are con­fi­dent your stu­dents will pick it up quickly and spend their time on research, not programming.

All com­po­nents have set­tings that you can con­fig­ure, which most of the time is all you need. However, you can also code your own com­po­nents or expand exist­ing ones to build any custom behav­ior you might need.

Very prob­a­bly yes. There are three major ways to get par­tic­i­pants for your exper­i­ments: Crowd-sourced recruit­ment, email recruit­ment, and third-party recruitment.

You can gen­er­ate a simple link to your experiment and send it to your par­tic­i­pants. You can upload a list of email address­es and we send per­son­alised links to them. Or you can connect to a third-party service like Pro­lif­ic, Sona Systems™, Amazon Mechan­i­cal Turk, Cloud Research, Qualtrics, Qualtrics Panel, Kantar Pro­files, and more.

If you have your own sample, just send them the link to your experiment or let us do so via email.

Nearly every­thing. We can measure clicks, and move­ment of the mouse, record audio or video and offer state-of-the-art eye-track­ing. All under one roof, all under one user interface.

Yes. A simple graph­i­cal user inter­face and a drag-and-drop editor are one of the main ben­e­fits of Gorilla. You’ll only really need a devel­op­er if you need to script some custom behav­iour, but only a very small pro­por­tion of our users ever need to go this far.

Gorilla is built to support the exist­ing BPS (The British Psy­cho­log­i­cal Society) and NIHR (Nation­al Insti­tute for Health Research) stan­dards which have strict codes of prac­tice to adhere to, in addi­tion to the leg­isla­tive require­ments of the GDPR and DPA2018. We take data secu­ri­ty very seri­ous­ly — learn more about our approach here.

Gorilla data comes through as a simple spread­sheet where each row is one response, so it’s easy to aggre­gate in Excel or similar tools. You can also down­load them as CSV files which you can then import into your favorite analy­sis tools.

Shop Builder is a sim­u­la­tion of a real shop­ping expe­ri­ence, and so is more real­is­tic than, say, answer­ing ques­tions on a survey. If you gave par­tic­i­pants money and ful­filled their pur­chas­es, it’s still not real­is­tic, as they’re not spend­ing their own money.

Sur­vey­mon­key is a fine survey tool but doesn’t offer con­di­tion­al flows or advanced func­tion­al­i­ty a behav­ioral sci­en­tist might need. Also, it’s pricey con­sid­er­ing its func­tion­al­i­ty. With Gorilla, ques­tion­naires are includ­ed in our price.

Qualtrics is a pow­er­ful tool, but is very expen­sive. It also lacks reac­tion-time tasks, games, mul­ti­play­er, or shop­ping sim­u­la­tions. The support desk costs extra. All that is includ­ed with Gorilla.

Con­joint is another fine tool. Their support is top-notch, but the inter­face is a bit dated and the pricing — espe­cial­ly for larger sample sizes — restricts the sizes of your samples quite quickly. But large and rep­re­sen­ta­tive samples are key to measure effects: Gorilla’s pricing doesn’t scale with the number of par­tic­i­pants in your experiments.

UserTesting.com (as well as Useberry.com) and Gorilla are two dif­fer­ent types of plat­forms that are used for dif­fer­ent pur­pos­es. UserTesting.com is a plat­form that allows busi­ness­es and orga­ni­za­tions to conduct usabil­i­ty testing and market research by gath­er­ing feed­back from real users, often during one-on-one video calls. It is com­mon­ly used to test web­sites, mobile apps, and other digital prod­ucts, and pro­vides tools for recruit­ing par­tic­i­pants, con­duct­ing user inter­views and surveys, and ana­lyz­ing data. Whether you should use UserTesting.com or Gorilla depends on your spe­cif­ic research goals and the type of data you are looking to collect. We are happy to jump on a call, just book a demo.

Thou­sands of researchers use Gorilla without our help. If you can mock-up your experiment in Pow­er­Point, you can build it in Gorilla. If you run into a road­block, our friend­ly and helpful support team will clear the road for you. If you are not sure how to design your experiment or don’t want to spend the time to imple­ment it, then Gorilla Studio is the right choice for you.