Responsible citizenship in a digitalized world – Field experiments with a news app

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Maja Adena; Professorin Dr. Sabrina Jeworrek
• Subject Area: Economic Policy, Applied Economics
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 567048275

During the last decades, scientific and technological progress has caused the world to become more interconnected and complex. Moreover, new societal challenges have arisen, such as mass migration and climate change. While it seems easier to meet these challenges with a better understanding of the world, empirical evidence suggests that political knowledge has not improved over the past years (Galston, 2001). The economic consequences of ill-informed citizens relate to both micro and macro levels. At the micro level, individuals with a biased worldview are likely to make suboptimal decisions. At the macro level, growing political polarization increases the risk of democratic instability, increasing populism, declining political trust, and reduced economic growth (Lorenz-Spreen et al., 2022). Thus, our project aims to enhance responsible citizenship in a digitalized world, which is not only timely and relevant but also has high impact potential. Our proposed project will advance our knowledge of individuals’ information-seeking and processing behavior, offering new insights into how to nurture responsible citizenship to address current and future societal challenges and secure social cohesion. More specifically, our project proposes and tests a number of behavioral interventions in three large-scale field experiments using a news app developed for research purposes. The app offers a rare opportunity to conduct research: it allows us to observe individuals’ actual news intake behavior in a natural environment over a prolonged time period. Besides testing the impact of the app itself, which offers complimentary access to a broad range of news sources, we will test design modifications of the app. We will exogenously vary the composition of the newsfeed regarding high- and low-quality news and, separately, give participants the choice about this composition as a potential commitment device. We will also shed light on the impact of this choice on individuals’ news consumption and their willingness to pay for this choice. Next, we will simplify access to high-quality news by offering summaries. These will be generated with the help of AI and offered in two versions: text only and an audio podcast (with animated pictures). The podcast treatment intervention addresses the decreasing popularity of text-based content in the era of YouTube and TikTok. Finally, we will focus on a subsample of the population that is the least likely to respond to the previously proposed interventions, i.e., individuals with extreme (political) views and low trust in media. For these individuals, we expect engagement with the news app to be a major hurdle. Therefore, we will test a monetary incentive scheme combined with gamification elements to induce higher engagement with the app itself and, as a second treatment intervention, an interactive chat function to foster engagement with the content.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Cooperation Partner: Dr. Zoe Rahwan