Thaler comes from the behavioral economics world, and I'd say his work on "nudging", and even the term "nudge" predates the dark patterns site. His book nudge i

Thaler comes from the behavioral economics world, and I'd say his work on "nudging", and even the term "nudge" predates the dark patterns site. His book nudge is from 2008[1], while the DNS info for dark patterns shows creation in 2010. His mentioning of the UX examples was probably a brief crossover example between worlds that occurred to him to highlight an instance, but I'd say it didn't occur to him to scour the software development UX world for existing terminology because, well, it's probably not familiar to him at all. Popularity on a Google search of a software term is of course going to win the popularity contest, it's the Internet. Do the same search of economic journals and you'll probably find the bias toward "nudge" over "dark patterns" in an extreme way. Different ideas proliferate on different mediums. I do strongly recommend checking out some of the Freakonomics podcasts[2] and blog posts that involve Thaler. Extremely interesting and useful across many disciplines! [1] http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/102715/richard-thaler-founding-father-behavioral-finance.asp http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/102715/richar... [2] http://freakonomics.com/?s=thaler&x=0&y=0 http://freakonomics.com/?s=thaler&x=0&y=0