FYI The hyperlink is not working🙂 but the preconference sounds interesting!

Additionally, big thanks goes to everyone who engaged with this paper at conferences, provided feedback, or just cheered me up on the way 🎉

And if you've made it this far, I want to share that I am super happy about this publication. Not only did I get a chance to include my (understudied!) country of origin, but it’s also the second publication from my recently defended dissertation😊

thank you Jakob 🤗

This highlights the role of technological affordances in news use, and their interaction with the automatic cognitive system of information processing that nudges typically leverage. 📄 The paper is published open access 🔑 in @digitaljournalism.bsky.social

🔎 TL;DR: Unlike news topics, country differences, or civic duty nudges, choice architecture emerged as the sole significant factor influencing news avoidance behavior.

This indicates that the civic duty to keep informed is a rather stable trait, likely formed early through education or socialization, making it hard to influence artificially on digital platforms.

This small change in choice architecture could increase incidental news exposure—and thus learning effects—even among news avoiders. However (!) such a nudge needs to be used transparently (more information in the paper).
2️⃣ In contrast, the civic duty nudge did not affect participants’ behavior.

👉 In practice, when setting up a personalized newsfeed, news outlets or social media platforms could pre-select categories like international or local news by default, prompting people to opt out of what they are not interested in rather than opt in.

1️⃣ Results in both countries are strikingly similar: Asking people to opt-out of news instead of opt-in was effective in reducing news avoidance during the initial phase of newsfeed setup.

2️⃣ A civic duty nudge, reminding people of their civic duty to keep informed, as previous research suggests that this duty is one of the strongest predictors of news avoidance.
📊 What did we find? 👇

Therefore, we conducted a pre-registered online comparative experiment (2×2) in Austria and Slovakia.

We tested two types of nudges:
1️⃣ A choice architecture nudge (default effects: opting-in and opting-out effects, where a default option is assigned to those not making a decision).

Hi both, the game sounds super cool 😎 I am not surprised Jakob is interested 🃏