News avoidance has become more common globally, and it is associated with negative democratic outcomes. However, only a handful of studies have explored solutions to reduce news avoidance, with nudges offering a potential approach.
Therefore, this study tests whether nudges can reduce news avoidance as limited news consumption—and it does so beyond established Western democracies. The authors conducted a pre-registered online comparative experiment (2 x 2) in Austria (N = 403) and Slovakia (N = 401), where they tested the potential of two types of nudges. The first nudge used is a choice architecture nudge (default effects: opting-in and opting-out effects, where a default option is assigned to those not making a decision), and the second is a civic duty nudge, reminding people of their civic duty to keep informed, as previous research suggests that the perception of one’s civic duty to keep informed is one of the strongest predictors of news avoidance.
Interestingly, the results in both countries are strikingly similar. First, the comparative experiment finds that asking people to opt-out of news instead of opt-in was effective in reducing news avoidance during the initial phase of newsfeed setup. When participants were asked to deselect news (opt-out), they ended up with almost double the number of news compared to when they were asked to select (opt-in). This finding not only corroborates the existence of opt-in and opt-out effects identified in other areas (e.g., health, marketing) regarding news avoidance but also offers valuable implications for both the theoretical aspects of news avoidance and practical implementations for news outlets’ digital platforms and social media.
In practice, this could look like 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. This small change in choice architecture could increase incidental news exposure—and thus learning effects—even among news avoiders. However, such a powerful nudge needs to be used transparently, and authors elaborate more on this issue in the paper itself.
Second, in contrast, the civic duty nudge did not affect participants’ 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.
Importantly, in contrast to the impact of specific news topics, country-differences, or civic duty nudges, choice architecture emerged as the sole significant factor influencing news avoidance behavior in this experiment. This highlights the important role of technical-material aspects of news environments, or technological affordances, in news use behaviors, as well as their interaction with cognitive systems of information processing, particularly the automatic system responsible for fast, associative, and effortless cognitive processes that nudges typically leverage.
For those interested in exploring the full details of this research, the open-access paper can be accessed at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21670811.2025.2562143
How to cite (APA): Betakova, D., Boomgaarden, H., & Lecheler, S. (2025). The Role of Choice Architecture in Mitigating News Avoidance. Digital Journalism, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2025.2562143
