The 7 deadly sins
of product design

Where the seven sins come from

The list is about 1,600 years old. In the 4th century the Christian ascetic Evagrius Ponticus described eight “evil thoughts” that could break a monk's resolve. Pope Gregory the Great, who reigned from 590 to 604, set out seven capital sins, and Thomas Aquinas elaborated them in the 13th century. In the order Encyclopaedia Britannica gives, they are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth.

They were called “capital” — from the Latin caput, head — because each was thought to be the source of many other wrongs. Dante built a mountain out of them, Chaucer closed The Canterbury Tales with them, and Hieronymus Bosch painted them on a tabletop. Each sin was also paired with a virtue that counters it.

What medieval theologians saw as dangers, product teams now see as motivation. They are the same forces: the wish to be admired, to have more, to want, to compare, to consume, to lash out and to rest. Silicon Valley noticed long ago.

“Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins.”

— Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, in The Wall Street Journal (2011). He went on to call Facebook ego, Zynga sloth and LinkedIn greed.

Where desire becomes a dark pattern

A dark pattern is a design that steers people into something they would not choose with full information. Every sin has one, and regulators have started to act:

• Sloth used against the user. The US Federal Trade Commission's $2.5 billion settlement with Amazon in September 2025 resolved allegations that Prime enrolled people without clear consent and made cancelling difficult.
• Envy built on fake scarcity. The UK Competition and Markets Authority secured commitments in 2019 from six hotel booking sites to stop pressure selling and misleading claims about a room's popularity.
• Greed that gamifies risk. Robinhood retired its trade-celebrating confetti in 2021 after criticism that it made investing feel like a game.
• Wrath amplified for engagement. Research on more than half a million tweets found that each moral-emotional word raised sharing by about 20%, which is why ranking for engagement alone tends to reward outrage.

The test is simple: would the user thank you for this design if they understood exactly how it works? If yes, it is persuasion. If not, it is a dark pattern — and a liability waiting to be found.

How we chose the examples

Each company appears for a feature it ships publicly and that anyone can try, such as Instagram's profile grid, Dropbox's referral storage or Amazon's 1-Click. We picked the clearest example of each desire at work, not the biggest brand. The history of the sins and their virtues follows Encyclopaedia Britannica, and every regulatory case and study is linked to its original source.

Which sins a product “stacks”, and the metric we suggest for each, are Science of Apps' editorial reading, based on behavioral science and our audits of apps and SaaS products. No company paid to be included or was consulted.

Last reviewed October 23, 2026. We review the examples every six months, and sooner when a company changes the feature we describe.

Key terms, defined

Seven deadly sins — the seven capital vices of Christian tradition: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. Seven heavenly virtues — the traits that counter them; Britannica pairs pride with humility, greed with charity, envy with gratitude, gluttony with temperance, wrath with patience and sloth with diligence, and tradition pairs lust with chastity.

Behavioral design — designing products around how people actually decide and act, using psychology and behavioral economics. Persuasive design — design that makes a chosen behavior easier or more appealing. Dark pattern — persuasive design that works against the user's interest.