CMN 3133: Reading #6 Oct 20th 2013
CMN 3133: Reading #6
Oct 20th 2013
Selective Exposure to Information: A critical Review David O. Sears and Jonathan L. Freedman Communication bias and attitude bias actually correlate and by considering other factors than attitude bias might account for selectivity. Selective exposureIt is a basic fact in the thinking of many social scientists about communication effects. Nevertheless, the empirical literature on selective exposure has been rather unsatisfying. Clarify what is meant by selective exposure then to characterize the evidence leading to its use and finally to evaluate the evidence regarding whether or not there is a psychological tendency to prefer supportive to non supportive information. Definition: Any systematic bias in audience composition. Sometimes it is used to describe any bias whatever in the composition of a communication audience, as long as the bias can be correlated with anything unusual in communication content. Partisan exposure is said to be present. Berelson and Steiner: human behaviour “people tend to see and hear communications that are favorable or congenial to their predispositions; they are more likely to see and hear congenial communications than neutral or hostile ones” Unusual agreement about a matter of opinion matters of opinion
Selectivity describes audience bias in the direction of agreeing to an unusual extent with the communicator’s stand on an issue relevant to the communication.
Klapper summarized the point this way: “by and large. People tend to expose themselves to those mass communications which are in accord with their existing attitudes”
They only assert that communication audiences usually share to an extraordinary degree, the viewpoints of the communicator. “De facto selectivity” preference for supportive rather than nonsupportive information. People are thought actively to seek out material that supports their opinions, and actively to avoid material that challenges the,. “it is likely that a desire for re enforcement of ones own point of view exists.” People expose themselves to communications with which they already agree and do not expose themselves to those with which they disagree, because they actively seek the former and actively avoid the latter. Presumably because of a general psychological preference for compatible information. De facto selectivity and selective exposure: Students tended to read newspapers whose editorial policy was the closest to their own opinions.. Each of these demonstrations shares a common basis: the correlation of positions on an attitude dimension with an act or a series of acts of exposure to mass communications. Measurement problems : even so, many reports of de facto selectivity may well overestimate the magnitude of the effect because of the kinds of measures used. antedate the oppurtunities for exposure, as for instance, when the respondent is known to have bought a car before the specific ads in questions appeared or in panel studies. None of these is a substitute for an advance measure, and each one maximizes the probability of obtaining de facto selectivity, since any attitude change is likely to reduce the discrepancy between communications and respondents position rather than increase it.
Alternative predictors: two general possibilities arise when we consider whether other variables are better predictors of selectivity than attitudes. Political conservatism predicted attendance rather well, but then so did a variety of other background variables. In fact, a substantial number of Crusaders ascribed their own attendance to church influence. So it may be quite arbitrary to give ideology the major credit for exposure even in this seemingly obvious case. Public affairs , communications most powerfully, years of education. Now, clearly, de facto selectivity effects could be obtained with any issue about which highly educated people generally disagree with poorly educated people. Procivil liberties, procivil rights and internationalist positions, pro UN campaigns Reaches mainly those sympathetic to it. “if there was an increase to exposure (during the campaign) it was their previous orientation (attitude toward the UN) which determined the extent to which people exposed themselves to further information about the United Nations” These are all things that well educated people are likely to do more than poorly educated people, regardless of how they feel about the UN Thus, many reports of de facto selective exposure may represent little more than cases in which highly educated persons, who normally are overrepresented in any audience for public affairs presentations, also share a common set of political, social and/or economic attitudes. Conclusion: so on several groups, published reports of de facto selectivity fall somewhat short of representing ideal proof that people do in fact “tend to expose themselves to those mass communications which are in accord with their existing attitudes. The communications have been most often, written articles offered in a way that clearly communicates their positions on the issue. Supportive information is usually defined simply as the communicators taking the same general position as the subject and nonsupportive as his taking the opposite position.
Some subjects were given a choice among positively oriented articles, and these subjects significantly preferred those favorable to the chosen exam. In other words, supportive information was preferred among the former subjects, nonsupportive slightly preferred among the latter. Rosen’s feelings are both striking and odd. The two studies considered together, provide evidence about every kind: with positive articles, subjects prefer supportive information; with negative articles, they have no preference; and with titles advocating reversal of choice and (thus clearly differing in supportiveness), they strongly prefer non supportive information. So partisan hip was not absent, but it operated on information evaluation rather than on information selection. Conclusions: By now it must be clear that there is no consistent result in this research. Five studies showed some preference for supportive information: Ehrilich (1957), Freedman and Sears (1963). Adams (1961), Mills et al. (positive articles) (1961 and Rosen (1961) Cognitive Dissonance and selective exposure: Even if there is no general preference in one way or the other, there must be conditions under which supportive information will be preferred. Cognitive dissonance theory two specific hypotheses have been offered, each based on the assumption that dissonance may be reduced or avoided by selectivity in information seeking. Voluntary exposure to information: As indicated above, clearly the most powerful known predictor of voluntary exposure to mass communication of informational of public affairs sort is the general factor of education and social class. So in contrast to the rather pale and ephemeral effects fo selectivity, de facto or otherwise, education yields enormous differences. Why it produces such differences is not known and remains a provocative question, and a subtler one than might appear at first glance.
Education, information utility and past history of exposure are but three of many factos that no doubt influence exposure preferences and rates of exposure. Demonstrated to affect exposure in a powerful way whereas demonstrations of selective exposure have been very weak.
CMN 3133: Reading #
Oct 20th 2013 10/21/2013
CMN 3133: Reading #6
Oct 20th 2013
Red Media. Blue media: Evidence of Ideological Selectivity in Media use: Shanto Iyengar and Kyu S. Hahn The division of the United States into predictability “red” and “blue” states and the gradual decline in the number of genuine “battlegrounds” where either party has a genuine chance of victory suggests that American politics today is more polarized than in eras past. Political activists are polarized but at the level of the mass public there is considerable debate. In this sense at least, mass public opinion is polarized. These newscasts offered a homogenous and generic pointcounterpoint perspective on the new, thus ensuring that exposure to the news was a common experience. Consumers can access with minimal effortnewspapers, radio and television stations all over the world. People who feel strongly about the correctness of their cause or policy preference seeks out information they believe is consistent rather than inconsistent with their preferences. Consistency theories 1950s Festinger. The theory predicted that as a means of minimizing dissonance, people would seek out information they expected to agree with. This pattern of exposure to In party appeals was considers the principle explanation for the reinforcing effects of campaigns/ An important theoretical limitations of the early work on selective exposure was that it failed to distinguish between deliberate or motivated exposure and de facto exposure that was a by product of voters personal networks or social context.
CMN 3133: Reading #6
Oct 20th 2013
For example, people first asked to make a decision and then presented with information choices tended to select information consistent with their decision information choices tended to select information consistent with their decision.
As political campaigns became less controlled by political parties and more media based voters found it increasingly difficult to encounter partisan messages or messengers. Republicans gravitated to talk radio, radio news and television advertising, whereas Democrats avoided talk radio and tuned into television news magazines and late night entertainment television. Availability of Fox News in fact makes it possible for Republicans and conservatives to see out a more sympathetic perspective and conversely, to avoid exposure to discordant points of view. Conservatives and Republicans should seek it out while Democrats and liberals do the opposite. Method: Experimental design online experiment Fox News as a preferred provider The sample Polimetrix an opinion research firm Hypotheses: Given the lineup of news sources, we naturally hypothesized that the demand for news stories would be heightened among Republicans and those with conservative political views when stories were labeled as Fox report/ Conversly, we expected participants on the left of the political spectrum to show greater intrest in sotires assigned to CNN or NPR
CMN 3133: Reading #6
Oct 20th 2013
CNN and NPR more closely matches the preferences of Democrats than the content provided by Fox. Uniform indifference for the BBC label among Democrats, republicans and non partisans alike.
Results: Overall effects of news labels: Consumers tend to ignore anonymous news reports. Evidence of selective exposure in news selection : Next we turn to assessing the role of the respondent attributes in news story selction, that is who chose which news stories to read? Of course, our primary focus was to assess whether respondents’ ideological induced a polarizing effect in news selection. The very same news story on crime or Iraq or politics or racial issues attracts a different audience when labeled as Fox, CNN, or NPR report. Consistent with our expectations, the effects of the Foc label were weakened for nonpolitical news. Republicans were drawn to the Fox label, they avoided CNN and NPR. As for the Democrats, they were just as averse to Fox as the Republicans were to CNN and NPR. But unlike the Republicans, they did not seem to converge on a particular news source. Although the CNN and NPR labels boosted interest among democrats, the effects appeared somewhat weak. As explained earlier this is because the respondents own characteristics remain the same regardless of the choice he makes, so they cannot on their own be a reason for choosing one new story over another; it is only when they are interacted with news story attributes (or choice specific attributes such as the source labels) that they can influence the respondents’ choice. Liberals have a strong aversion to Fox but no particular affinity for any of the nonFox sources/ As noted earlier, some contend that polarization is limited to activists whereas the general public remains centrist.
CMN 3133: Reading #6
Oct 20th 2013
When the media turn to relatively non political subjects, more and less engaged conservatives and liberals are equally divided in their news choices.
Conclusion: No matter how we sliced the data either at the level of our news stories the results demonstrates that Fox News is the dominant news source for conservatives (the results presented above are equally strong if we substitute party identification for ideology) Politically slanted news programming allows a new organization to create a niches for itself. Recent theoretical work in economics shoes that under competitions and diversity of opinion, newspapers will provide content that is more biased. Thus as the audience become polarized over matter of politics and public policy, rational media owners stand to gain market share by injecting more rather than less political bias in the news. When the audience is polarized “news with an edge makes for market success. During periods of Republican governance for instance, criticisms of the incumbent administration conveyed by mainstream news organizations can be dismissed as evidence of liberal bias thus further increasing partisan polarization. Selective exposure is especially likely in the new media environment because of information overload. New forms of communication not only deliver much larger chunks of campaign information, but they also facilitate consumers ability to attend to the information selectively. As we have found, people prefer to encounter information that they find supportive or consistent with their existing beliefs.
Oct 20th 2013
Selective Exposure to Information: A critical Review David O. Sears and Jonathan L. Freedman Communication bias and attitude bias actually correlate and by considering other factors than attitude bias might account for selectivity. Selective exposureIt is a basic fact in the thinking of many social scientists about communication effects. Nevertheless, the empirical literature on selective exposure has been rather unsatisfying. Clarify what is meant by selective exposure then to characterize the evidence leading to its use and finally to evaluate the evidence regarding whether or not there is a psychological tendency to prefer supportive to non supportive information. Definition: Any systematic bias in audience composition. Sometimes it is used to describe any bias whatever in the composition of a communication audience, as long as the bias can be correlated with anything unusual in communication content. Partisan exposure is said to be present. Berelson and Steiner: human behaviour “people tend to see and hear communications that are favorable or congenial to their predispositions; they are more likely to see and hear congenial communications than neutral or hostile ones” Unusual agreement about a matter of opinion matters of opinion
Selectivity describes audience bias in the direction of agreeing to an unusual extent with the communicator’s stand on an issue relevant to the communication.
Klapper summarized the point this way: “by and large. People tend to expose themselves to those mass communications which are in accord with their existing attitudes”
They only assert that communication audiences usually share to an extraordinary degree, the viewpoints of the communicator. “De facto selectivity” preference for supportive rather than nonsupportive information. People are thought actively to seek out material that supports their opinions, and actively to avoid material that challenges the,. “it is likely that a desire for re enforcement of ones own point of view exists.” People expose themselves to communications with which they already agree and do not expose themselves to those with which they disagree, because they actively seek the former and actively avoid the latter. Presumably because of a general psychological preference for compatible information. De facto selectivity and selective exposure: Students tended to read newspapers whose editorial policy was the closest to their own opinions.. Each of these demonstrations shares a common basis: the correlation of positions on an attitude dimension with an act or a series of acts of exposure to mass communications. Measurement problems : even so, many reports of de facto selectivity may well overestimate the magnitude of the effect because of the kinds of measures used. antedate the oppurtunities for exposure, as for instance, when the respondent is known to have bought a car before the specific ads in questions appeared or in panel studies. None of these is a substitute for an advance measure, and each one maximizes the probability of obtaining de facto selectivity, since any attitude change is likely to reduce the discrepancy between communications and respondents position rather than increase it.
Alternative predictors: two general possibilities arise when we consider whether other variables are better predictors of selectivity than attitudes. Political conservatism predicted attendance rather well, but then so did a variety of other background variables. In fact, a substantial number of Crusaders ascribed their own attendance to church influence. So it may be quite arbitrary to give ideology the major credit for exposure even in this seemingly obvious case. Public affairs , communications most powerfully, years of education. Now, clearly, de facto selectivity effects could be obtained with any issue about which highly educated people generally disagree with poorly educated people. Procivil liberties, procivil rights and internationalist positions, pro UN campaigns Reaches mainly those sympathetic to it. “if there was an increase to exposure (during the campaign) it was their previous orientation (attitude toward the UN) which determined the extent to which people exposed themselves to further information about the United Nations” These are all things that well educated people are likely to do more than poorly educated people, regardless of how they feel about the UN Thus, many reports of de facto selective exposure may represent little more than cases in which highly educated persons, who normally are overrepresented in any audience for public affairs presentations, also share a common set of political, social and/or economic attitudes. Conclusion: so on several groups, published reports of de facto selectivity fall somewhat short of representing ideal proof that people do in fact “tend to expose themselves to those mass communications which are in accord with their existing attitudes. The communications have been most often, written articles offered in a way that clearly communicates their positions on the issue. Supportive information is usually defined simply as the communicators taking the same general position as the subject and nonsupportive as his taking the opposite position.
Some subjects were given a choice among positively oriented articles, and these subjects significantly preferred those favorable to the chosen exam. In other words, supportive information was preferred among the former subjects, nonsupportive slightly preferred among the latter. Rosen’s feelings are both striking and odd. The two studies considered together, provide evidence about every kind: with positive articles, subjects prefer supportive information; with negative articles, they have no preference; and with titles advocating reversal of choice and (thus clearly differing in supportiveness), they strongly prefer non supportive information. So partisan hip was not absent, but it operated on information evaluation rather than on information selection. Conclusions: By now it must be clear that there is no consistent result in this research. Five studies showed some preference for supportive information: Ehrilich (1957), Freedman and Sears (1963). Adams (1961), Mills et al. (positive articles) (1961 and Rosen (1961) Cognitive Dissonance and selective exposure: Even if there is no general preference in one way or the other, there must be conditions under which supportive information will be preferred. Cognitive dissonance theory two specific hypotheses have been offered, each based on the assumption that dissonance may be reduced or avoided by selectivity in information seeking. Voluntary exposure to information: As indicated above, clearly the most powerful known predictor of voluntary exposure to mass communication of informational of public affairs sort is the general factor of education and social class. So in contrast to the rather pale and ephemeral effects fo selectivity, de facto or otherwise, education yields enormous differences. Why it produces such differences is not known and remains a provocative question, and a subtler one than might appear at first glance.
Education, information utility and past history of exposure are but three of many factos that no doubt influence exposure preferences and rates of exposure. Demonstrated to affect exposure in a powerful way whereas demonstrations of selective exposure have been very weak.
CMN 3133: Reading #
Oct 20th 2013 10/21/2013
CMN 3133: Reading #6
Oct 20th 2013
Red Media. Blue media: Evidence of Ideological Selectivity in Media use: Shanto Iyengar and Kyu S. Hahn The division of the United States into predictability “red” and “blue” states and the gradual decline in the number of genuine “battlegrounds” where either party has a genuine chance of victory suggests that American politics today is more polarized than in eras past. Political activists are polarized but at the level of the mass public there is considerable debate. In this sense at least, mass public opinion is polarized. These newscasts offered a homogenous and generic pointcounterpoint perspective on the new, thus ensuring that exposure to the news was a common experience. Consumers can access with minimal effortnewspapers, radio and television stations all over the world. People who feel strongly about the correctness of their cause or policy preference seeks out information they believe is consistent rather than inconsistent with their preferences. Consistency theories 1950s Festinger. The theory predicted that as a means of minimizing dissonance, people would seek out information they expected to agree with. This pattern of exposure to In party appeals was considers the principle explanation for the reinforcing effects of campaigns/ An important theoretical limitations of the early work on selective exposure was that it failed to distinguish between deliberate or motivated exposure and de facto exposure that was a by product of voters personal networks or social context.
CMN 3133: Reading #6
Oct 20th 2013
For example, people first asked to make a decision and then presented with information choices tended to select information consistent with their decision information choices tended to select information consistent with their decision.
As political campaigns became less controlled by political parties and more media based voters found it increasingly difficult to encounter partisan messages or messengers. Republicans gravitated to talk radio, radio news and television advertising, whereas Democrats avoided talk radio and tuned into television news magazines and late night entertainment television. Availability of Fox News in fact makes it possible for Republicans and conservatives to see out a more sympathetic perspective and conversely, to avoid exposure to discordant points of view. Conservatives and Republicans should seek it out while Democrats and liberals do the opposite. Method: Experimental design online experiment Fox News as a preferred provider The sample Polimetrix an opinion research firm Hypotheses: Given the lineup of news sources, we naturally hypothesized that the demand for news stories would be heightened among Republicans and those with conservative political views when stories were labeled as Fox report/ Conversly, we expected participants on the left of the political spectrum to show greater intrest in sotires assigned to CNN or NPR
CMN 3133: Reading #6
Oct 20th 2013
CNN and NPR more closely matches the preferences of Democrats than the content provided by Fox. Uniform indifference for the BBC label among Democrats, republicans and non partisans alike.
Results: Overall effects of news labels: Consumers tend to ignore anonymous news reports. Evidence of selective exposure in news selection : Next we turn to assessing the role of the respondent attributes in news story selction, that is who chose which news stories to read? Of course, our primary focus was to assess whether respondents’ ideological induced a polarizing effect in news selection. The very same news story on crime or Iraq or politics or racial issues attracts a different audience when labeled as Fox, CNN, or NPR report. Consistent with our expectations, the effects of the Foc label were weakened for nonpolitical news. Republicans were drawn to the Fox label, they avoided CNN and NPR. As for the Democrats, they were just as averse to Fox as the Republicans were to CNN and NPR. But unlike the Republicans, they did not seem to converge on a particular news source. Although the CNN and NPR labels boosted interest among democrats, the effects appeared somewhat weak. As explained earlier this is because the respondents own characteristics remain the same regardless of the choice he makes, so they cannot on their own be a reason for choosing one new story over another; it is only when they are interacted with news story attributes (or choice specific attributes such as the source labels) that they can influence the respondents’ choice. Liberals have a strong aversion to Fox but no particular affinity for any of the nonFox sources/ As noted earlier, some contend that polarization is limited to activists whereas the general public remains centrist.
CMN 3133: Reading #6
Oct 20th 2013
When the media turn to relatively non political subjects, more and less engaged conservatives and liberals are equally divided in their news choices.
Conclusion: No matter how we sliced the data either at the level of our news stories the results demonstrates that Fox News is the dominant news source for conservatives (the results presented above are equally strong if we substitute party identification for ideology) Politically slanted news programming allows a new organization to create a niches for itself. Recent theoretical work in economics shoes that under competitions and diversity of opinion, newspapers will provide content that is more biased. Thus as the audience become polarized over matter of politics and public policy, rational media owners stand to gain market share by injecting more rather than less political bias in the news. When the audience is polarized “news with an edge makes for market success. During periods of Republican governance for instance, criticisms of the incumbent administration conveyed by mainstream news organizations can be dismissed as evidence of liberal bias thus further increasing partisan polarization. Selective exposure is especially likely in the new media environment because of information overload. New forms of communication not only deliver much larger chunks of campaign information, but they also facilitate consumers ability to attend to the information selectively. As we have found, people prefer to encounter information that they find supportive or consistent with their existing beliefs.
