The article outlines some of the status quo of research and potential of nudge and digital nudging in the field of journalism, especially in terms of news consumption and opinion shaping. A nudge is a gentle and subtle prompt or encouragement designed to influence someone’s behavior or decision-making without being forceful or coercive. By combining theory and journalism practice, the paper provides insights into how this concept can be applied to influence public cognition and behavior, particularly in relation to news media. Standing from a technical philosophical stance, the paper argues that nudge technology can be positive or negative depending on the ethical considerations involved and the intentions of news producers and interface designers. Finally, the paper proposed measures to effectively apply digital nudges in creating a virtuous journalism environment. The findings from the paper are relevant for researchers interested in understanding how media can shape our opinions and behaviors, including journalists, researchers, policymakers, and members of the public.
Albanie, S., Shakespeare, H., & Gunter, T. (2017). Unknowable Manipulators: Social Network Curator Algorithms.
Anagnostopoulou, E., Urban?i?, J., Bothos, E., Magoutas, B., Bradesko, L., Schrammel, J., & Mentzas, G. (2020). From mobility patterns to behavioural change: Leveraging travel behaviour and personality profiles to nudge for sustainable transportation. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, 54(1), 157–178. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-018-0528-1
Andersen, K., Ohme, J., Bjarnøe, C., Bordacconi, M. J., Albæk, E., & De Vreese, C. H. (2021). Generational Gaps in Political Media Use and Civic Engagement: From Baby Boomers to Generation Z. Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003111498
And?, S., & Akesson, J. (2021). Nudging Away False News: Evidence from a Social Norms Experiment. Digital Journalism, 9(1), 106–125.
https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2020.1847674
Aral, S. (2020). The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--and How We Must Adapt. Currency.
Barton, A., & Grüne-Yanoff, T. (2015). From Libertarian Paternalism to Nudging—And Beyond. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 6(3), 341–359. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-015-0268-x
Bechmann, A., & Nielbo, K. L. (2018). Are We Exposed to the Same “News” in the News Feed? Digital Journalism, 6(8), 990–1002. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2018.1510741
Bovens, L. (2008). The Ethics of Nudge. In M. J. Hansson & T. Grüne-Yanoff (Eds.), Preference Change: Approaches from Philosophy, Economics and Psychology. (pp. 207–220). Springer. https://philarchive.org/rec/BOVTEO-8
Caraban, A., Karapanos, E., Gonçalves, D., & Campos, P. (2019). 23 Ways to Nudge: A Review of Technology-Mediated Nudging in Human-Computer Interaction. Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300733
Cialdini, R. B., & Trost, M. R. (1998). Social influence: Social norms, conformity and compliance. In The handbook of social psychology, Vols. 1-2, 4th ed (pp. 151–192). McGraw-Hill.
Demarque, C., Charalambides, L., Hilton, D. J., & Waroquier, L. (2015). Nudging sustainable consumption: The use of descriptive norms to promote a minority behavior in a realistic online shopping environment. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 43, 166–174. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2015.06.008
Dorrestijn, S. (2012). Theories and Figures of Technical Mediation. In Design and Anthropology. Routledge.
Du, Y. R. (2023). Personalization, Echo Chambers, News Literacy, and Algorithmic Literacy: A Qualitative Study of AI-Powered News App Users. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 0(0), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2023.2182787
Dworkin, G. (2015). Defining Paternalism. In T. Schramme (Ed.), New Perspectives on Paternalism and Health Care (pp. 17–29). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17960-5_2
Garrett, R. K. (2009). Echo chambers online?: Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users1. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14(2), 265–285. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2009.01440.x
Gimpel, H., Heger, S., Olenberger, C., & Utz, L. (2021). The Effectiveness of Social Norms in Fighting Fake News on Social Media. Journal of Management Information Systems, 38(1), 196–221. https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2021.1870389
Glaeser, E. L. (2006). Paternalism and psychology. University of Chicago Law Review, 73, 133–156.
Gray, C. M., Kou, Y., Battles, B., Hoggatt, J., & Toombs, A. L. (2018). The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174108
Halpern, D. (2015). Inside the Nudge Unit: How small changes can make a big difference. WH Allen.
Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, The (12.2.1976 edition). Harper Torchbooks.
Heidegger, M. (1997). The Age of the World Picture. In A. I. Tauber (Ed.), Science and the Quest for Reality (pp. 70–88). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25249-7_3
Helberger, N., Karppinen, K., & D’Acunto, L. (2018). Exposure diversity as a design principle for recommender systems. Information, Communication & Society, 21(2), 191–207. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1271900
Horne, B. D., Nevo, D., Adali, S., Manikonda, L., & Arrington, C. (2020). Tailoring heuristics and timing AI interventions for supporting news veracity assessments. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 2, 100043. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbr.2020.100043
Hornuf, L., & Mangold, S. (2022). Digital Dark Nudges. In L. Hornuf (Ed.), Diginomics Research Perspectives (pp. 89–104). Springer International Publishing.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04063-4_5
Hu, Y. (2019). Design of media system selection. Journalism and Mass Communication, 3, 28-30+42. https://doi.org/10.15897/j.cnki.cn51-1046/g2.2019.03.004
Hummel, D., & Maedche, A. (2019). How effective is nudging? A quantitative review on the effect sizes and limits of empirical nudging studies. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 80, 47–58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2019.03.005
Jesse, M., & Jannach, D. (2021). Digital nudging with recommender systems: Survey and future directions. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 3, 100052
. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbr.2020.100052
Jia, H. (2018). Nudge and Its Enlightenment for Technological Design. Studies in Dialectics of Nature, 34(6), 44–50. https://doi.org/10.19484/j.cnki.1000-8934.2018.06.007
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow (1st ed). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Kim A., & Dennis A. R. (2018). Says Who? The Effects of Presentation Format and Source Rating on Fake News in Social Media (SSRN Scholarly Paper No. 2987866). https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2987866
Kiskola, J., Olsson, T., Rantasila, A., Syrjämäki, A. H., Ilves, M., Isokoski, P., & Surakka, V. (2022). User-centred quality of UI interventions aiming to influence online news commenting behaviour. Behaviour & Information Technology, 0(0), 1–33.
https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2022.2108723
Kleis Nielsen, R., & Ganter, S. A. (2018). Dealing with digital intermediaries: A case study of the relations between publishers and platforms. New Media & Society, 20(4), 1600–1617. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817701318
Kümpel, A. S. (2020). The Matthew Effect in social media news use: Assessing inequalities in news exposure and news engagement on social network sites (SNS). Journalism, 21(8), 1083–1098. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884920915374
Latour, B. (1988). Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Revised ed. edition). Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (1st edition). Oxford University Press.
Lepenies, R., & Ma?ecka, M. (2015). The Institutional Consequences of Nudging – Nudges, Politics, and the Law. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 6
. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-015-0243-6
Luguri, J., & Strahilevitz, L. J. (2021). Shining a Light on Dark Patterns. Journal of Legal Analysis, 13(1), 43–109. https://doi.org/10.1093/jla/laaa006
Masur, P. K., DiFranzo, D., & Bazarova, N. N. (2021). Behavioral contagion on social media: Effects of social norms, design interventions, and critical media literacy on self-disclosure. PLOS ONE, 16(7), e0254670. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254670
Mathur, A., Acar, G., Friedman, M. J., Lucherini, E., Mayer, J., Chetty, M., & Narayanan, A. (2019). Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359183
Miller, V. (2015). The Crisis of Presence in Contemporary Culture: Ethics, Privacy and Speech in Mediated Social Life. SAGE.
Mills, S. (2022). Finding the ‘nudge’ in hypernudge. Technology in Society, 71, 102117. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2022.102117
Mirbabaie, M., Ehnis, C., Stieglitz, S., Bunker, D., & Rose, T. (2021). Digital Nudging in Social Media Disaster Communication. Information Systems Frontiers, 23(5), 1097–1113. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-020-10062-z
Mitchelstein, E., & Boczkowski, P. J. (2009). Between tradition and change: A review of recent research on online news production. Journalism, 10(5), 562–586. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884909106533
Möller, J., Trilling, D., Helberger, N., & van Es, B. (2018). Do not blame it on the algorithm: An empirical assessment of multiple recommender systems and their impact on content diversity. Information, Communication & Society, 21(7), 959–977. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1444076
Møller, L. A. (2022). Between Personal and Public Interest: How Algorithmic News Recommendation Reconciles with Journalism as an Ideology. Digital Journalism, 10(10), 1794–1812. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2022.2032782
Monzer, C., Moeller, J., Helberger, N., & Eskens, S. (2020). User Perspectives on the News Personalisation Process: Agency, Trust and Utility as Building Blocks. Digital Journalism, 8(9), 1142–1162. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2020.1773291
Mulder, M., Inel, O., Oosterman, J., & Tintarev, N. (2021). Operationalizing Framing to Support Multiperspective Recommendations of Opinion Pieces. Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 478–488. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445911
Nekmat, E. (2020). Nudge Effect of Fact-Check Alerts: Source Influence and Media Skepticism on Sharing of News Misinformation in Social Media. Social Media + Society, 6(1), 2056305119897322. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119897322
Petticrew, M., Maani, N., Pettigrew, L., Rutter, H., & Van Schalkwyk, M. C. (2020). Dark Nudges and Sludge in Big Alcohol: Behavioral Economics, Cognitive Biases, and Alcohol Industry Corporate Social Responsibility. The Milbank Quarterly, 98(4), 1290–1328. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0009.12475
Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion. In R. E. Petty & J. T. Cacioppo (Eds.), Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change (pp. 1–24). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4964-1_1
Plak, S., van Klaveren, C., & Cornelisz, I. (2022). Raising student engagement using digital nudges tailored to students’ motivation and perceived ability levels. British Journal of Educational Technology, n/a(n/a). https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13261
Pu, J., Chen, Y., Qiu, L., & Cheng, H. K. (2020). Does Identity Disclosure Help or Hurt User Content Generation? Social Presence, Inhibition, and Displacement Effects. Information Systems Research, 31(2), 297–322.
https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2019.0885
Reisch, L. A. (2020). Nudging hell und dunkel: Regeln für digitales Nudging. Wirtschaftsdienst, 100(2), 87–91. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10273-020-2573-y
Saghai, Y. (2013). Salvaging the concept of nudge. Journal of Medical Ethics, 39(8), 487–493. https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2012-100727
Schmitt, J., Debbelt, C., & Schneider, F. (2017). Too much Information? Predictors of Information Overload in the Context of Online-News Exposure. Information Communication and Society, 21, 1151–1167. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1305427
Schneider, C., Weinmann, M., & vom Brocke, J. (2018). Digital nudging: Guiding online user choices through interface design. Communications of the ACM, 61(7), 67–73. https://doi.org/10.1145/3213765
Shi, J., Hu, P., Lai, K. K., & Chen, G. (2018). Determinants of users’ information dissemination behavior on social networking sites: An elaboration likelihood model perspective. Internet Research, 28(2), 393–418. https://doi.org/10.1108/IntR-01-2017-0038
Sin R., Harris T., Nilsson S., & Beck T. (2022). Dark patterns in online shopping: Do they work and can nudges help mitigate impulse buying? Behavioural Public Policy, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2022.11
Sun, T., & Zhong, B. (2020). Multitasking as multisensory behavior: Revisiting media multitasking in the perspective of media ecology theory. Computers in Human Behavior, 104, 106151. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.09.027
Sunstein, C. R. (2019). How Change Happens. The MIT Press.
Susser, D. (2019). Invisible Influence: Artificial Intelligence and the Ethics of Adaptive Choice Architectures. Proceedings of the 2019 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 403–408. https://doi.org/10.1145/3306618.3314286
Tandoc, E. C., Lee, J., Chew, M., Tan, F. X., & Goh, Z. H. (2021). Falling for fake news: The role of political bias and cognitive ability. Asian Journal of Communication, 31(4), 237–253. https://doi.org/10.1080/01292986.2021.1941149
Tenner, E. (2003). Our Own Devices: The Past and Future of Body Technology (1st edition). Knopf.
Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Yale University Press.
Thaler, R. H., Sunstein, C. R., & Balz, J. P. (2013). Choice architecture. In The behavioral foundations of public policy (pp. 428–439). Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400845347
Vandenbroele J., Vermeir I., Geuens M., Slabbinck H., & Kerckhove A. V. (2020). Nudging to get our food choices on a sustainable track. Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 79(1), 133–146. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0029665119000971
Verbeek, P. P. (2006). The Morality of Things – A Postphenomenological Inquiry. In E. Selinger (Ed.), Postphenomenology: A critical companion to Ihde. (pp. 117–128). State University of New York Press.
Verbeek, P. P. (2011). Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things. University of Chicago Press.
Vermeulen, J. (2022). To Nudge or Not to Nudge: News Recommendation as a Tool to Achieve Online Media Pluralism. Digital Journalism, 0(0), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2022.2026796
Weijers, R. J., Ganushchak, L., Ouwehand, K., & de Koning, B. B. (2022). “I’ll Be There”: Improving Online Class Attendance with a Commitment Nudge during COVID-19. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 44(1), 12–24.
https://doi.org/10.1080/01973533.2021.2023534
Weinmann, M., Schneider, C., & Brocke, J. vom. (2016). Digital Nudging. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 58(6), 433–436. https://doi.org/The Ethics of Nudge
Yeung, K. (2017). ‘Hypernudge’: Big Data as a mode of regulation by design. Information, Communication & Society, 20(1), 118–136.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1186713
Zuboff, S. (2015). Big other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization. Journal of Information Technology, 30(1), 75–89. https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2015.5
