In the study “Nudges for News Recommenders: Prominent Article Positioning Increases Selection, Engagement, and Recall of Environmental News, but Reducing Complexity Does Not,” Dr. Nicolas Mattis, Lucien Heitz, Dr. Philipp K. Masur, Prof. Dr. Judith Möller, and Prof. Dr. Wouter van Atteveldt examine how the placement and presentation of environmental news in news aggregators can influence user behavior.
Abstract
News aggregators inherently constitute choice architectures in which placement and presentation of news articles in the user interface affect how people perceive and engage with them. Accordingly, deliberate changes of a news aggregators’ choice architecture may nudge engagement. Against this background, our study aims to test the effects of 2 nudges, namely a position and an accessibility nudge, on (a) the selection of, (b) the engagement with, and (c) learning from environmental news articles by means of a 7-day field experiment using a news aggregator app in the United Kingdom.
Results suggest that prominent article positioning coupled with visual highlighting significantly increases the selection of environmental news, its reading time and recall of information. In contrast, automated rewriting of environmental articles for lower text complexity had no significant effects. Additional analyses indicate that neither nudge backfired by decreasing user satisfaction, thus suggesting the practical usability of our approach.
Nicolas Mattis, Lucien Heitz, Philipp K. Masur, Judith Moeller, and Wouter van Atteveldt. “Nudges for News Recommenders: Prominent Article Positioning Increases Selection, Engagement, and Recall of Environmental News, but Reducing Complexity Does Not.” Journal of Communication, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf019.