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The Effect of Opposing Media Treatment on Polarization. Points indicate mean responses for both outcome variables and 95% confidence intervals within stated preference subgroups. Closed circles indicate subgroup estimates in the free choice arm of our experiment, while open triangles indicate estimates of the outcome after treatment effects from the forced choice arm of the experiment are applied to free choice estimates.
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Does media choice cause polarization, or merely reflect it? We investigate a critical aspect of this puzzle: how partisan media contribute to attitude polarization among different groups of media consumers. We implement a new experimental design, called the Preference-Incorporating Choice and Assignment (PICA) design, that incorporates both free ch...
Citations
... Regarding attitudinal change by the fact-checking news, the pattern we confirmed in Study 1 was more likely in line with the persuasive effect (De Benedictis-Kessner et al., 2019;Guess & Coppock, 2018; rather than the backfire effect (Nyhan & Reifler, 2010). When the correction was conveyed by partisan media, a respondent's agreement towards misinformation uniformly decreased as a result of the exposure to such correction, and we do not find evidence of individual heterogeneity in such patterns. ...
The effectiveness of and its boundary conditions regarding fact–checking news exposure have significant normative and practical implications. While many of the prior studies have focused on the attitudinal consequences of fact–checking news delivered by neutral third parties such as fact–check organizations, relatively less is known as to the effect of fact–checking news delivered by partisan media. Based on the frameworks of motivated reasoning and the hostile‐media effect, we investigate the possibility of decoupling between attitudinal persuasion and perceptual backfire by fact–checking news by partisan media—that is, exposure to fact–checking news increases bias perception of such news yet nevertheless attitudinally persuades audiences. Based on a series of original experiments conducted in South Korea and in the United States, we find consistent support for our prediction, in that exposure to fact–checking news produces the corrective effects, yet at the same time perceived bias of the fact–checking news systematically varies as a function of the ideological slant of partisan media.
... People who distrust mainstream media might not be exposed to this negative coverage of QAnon in the first place. Future work could extend our findings to examine whether positive coverage of QAnon-supporting candidates on fringe media sources changes how respondents evaluate them, in addition to more directly incorporating choice into the design, such as through a PICA design (Benedictis-Kessner et al., 2019;Egami et al., 2023). Future work should also consider sample recruitment more carefully. ...
Most research investigates why the public embraces conspiracy theories, but few studies empirically examine how Americans evaluate the politicians who do. We argued that politicians portrayed as supporting QAnon would garner negative mainstream media attention, but this coverage could increase their name recognition and signal positive attributes to voters with low trust in media who would feel warmer toward those candidates. Although we confirm that candidates friendly toward QAnon receive more negative media coverage, our nationally-representative vignette experiment reveals that QAnon support decreases favorability toward candidates, even among seemingly sympathetic sub-populations. A follow-up conjoint experiment, varying whether candidates support QAnon, replicates these findings. This paper is one of the first to highlight the potential costs of elite conspiracy theory support and complicates popular narratives about QAnon.
... This effect is exacerbated by the fact that climate change has been increasingly framed as a partisan issue since the early 2000s on mainstream media (Tesler, 2018). Because partisan identity also corresponds to a choice of media consumption (de Benedictis-Kessner et al., 2019), the preferred media of liberals and conservatives differ dramatically in how they report scientific information and portray scientists (Garrett et al., 2019). ...
... If these partisan sources are one's main source of scientific information rather than scientific sources, information from these sources may not be questioned, as information from trusted sources is more readily believed (Albarracín et al., 2017;Johnson et al., 2022Johnson et al., , 2024 compared to information from less trusted sources (Van Boekel et al., 2017). Partisan news can have a strong impact on those who read it, increasing polarization and persuading these individuals (de Benedictis-Kessner et al., 2019). ...
A crucial hurdle to addressing climate change is science denial. While research suggests that science denial is related to judgments individuals make about the credibility of information sources, less is known about how source credibility and characteristics of the individual interact to affect science denial. In the present study, we examined the extent to which individuals' belief in climate change claims and trust in the sources of these claims were influenced by the interaction between the political leaning of information sources (i.e., conservative media vs. liberal media vs. scientific institutions), individuals' political ideologies, and individuals' epistemic beliefs (beliefs about the nature of knowledge and knowing). We found that both individuals' belief in climate change information and trust in sources were predicted by interactions between these variables. For example, participants who believed that facts are not politically constructed were more likely to believe in climate information and trust scientific sources, regardless of the participant's partisanship. These findings suggest that epistemic profiles associated with deference to scientific sources might protect against climate change denial. Therefore, cultivating such epistemic beliefs and the skills to critically evaluate sources could be instrumental to combating climate change denial.
... Second, our respondents had no ability to choose what they wanted to read in our experiment, as it was randomly assigned (cf. de Benedictis-Kessner et al., 2019). Perhaps some of the people whose views were changed by this article would never choose to read such an article in reality. ...
Do narratives about the causes of inequality influence support for redistribution? Scholarship suggests that information about levels of inequality does not easily shift redistributive attitudes. We embed information about inequality within a commentary article depicting the economy as being rigged to advantage elites, a common populist narrative of both the left and right. Drawing on the media effects and political economy literature, we expect articles employing narratives that portray inequality as the consequence of systemic unfairness to increase demands for redistribution. We test this proposition via an online survey experiment with 7426 respondents in Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our narrative treatment significantly increases attitudes favoring redistribution in five of the countries. In the US the treatment has no effect. We consider several reasons for the non-result in the US – highlighting beliefs about government inefficiency – and conclude by discussing general implications of our findings.
... Experimental conditions: We use a hybrid experimental design that combines exogenous treatments with self-selection to answer research questions that cannot be answered from completely randomized studies (Arceneaux and Johnson 2013;De Benedictis-Kessner et al. 2019;Gaines and Kuklinski 2011). The experiment consists of two parts: Part I provides participants with either an exogenously allocated positive (a.) or negative information about the pandemic in their country relative to a reference country (b.). ...
When do cross-national comparisons enable citizens to hold governments accountable? According to recent work in comparative politics, benchmarking across borders is a powerful mechanism for making elections work. However, little attention has been paid to the choice of benchmarks and how they shape democratic accountability. We extend existing theories to account for endogenous benchmarking. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a test case, we embedded experiments capturing self-selection and exogenous exposure to benchmark information from representative surveys in France, Germany, and the UK. The experiments reveal that when individuals have the choice, they are likely to seek out congruent information in line with their prior view of the government. Moreover, going beyond existing experiments on motivated reasoning and biased information choice, endogenous benchmarking occurs in all three countries despite the absence of partisan labels. Altogether, our results suggest that endogenous benchmarking weakens the democratic benefits of comparisons across borders.
... We tentatively assumed that an estimate of actual societal effects can be ascertained best when forced-exposure and selfselected-exposure designs are used in combination. The strength of a combined use has already been acknowledged in other fields, such as political science (Arceneaux & Johnson, 2013;De Benedictis-Kessner et al., 2019), political communication (Stroud et al., 2019), psychology (Johnston, 1996;Johnston & Macrae, 1994), and media psychology (Dahlgren, 2021). An investigation in the media stereotyping domain is still pending. ...
The media portray various social groups stereotypically, and studying the effects of these portrayals on prejudice is paramount. Yet, audience selectivity—inherent within today’s high-choice media environments—has largely been disregarded. Relatedly, the predominance of forced-exposure designs is a source of concern. This article proposes the integration of audience selectivity into media stereotype effects research. Study 1 (N = 1,166) indicated that prejudiced individuals tended to approach prejudice-consistent stereotypical news and avoid prejudice-challenging counter-stereotypical news. Using a forced-exposure experiment, study 2 (N = 380) showed detrimental effects of prejudice-consistent news and beneficial effects of prejudice-challenging news. Relying on a self-selected exposure paradigm, study 3 (N = 1,149) provided evidence for preference-based reinforcement. Study 4’s “net-effect perspective” (N = 937) indicated that operationalizing exposure as forced or self-selected can lead to different interpretations of actual societal effects. The findings emphasize the key role played by audience selectivity when studying media effects.
... In addition, past work on the benefits of news use tends to rely on largely unreliable survey self-reports Prior, 2009). Experimental designs, in turn, often ''force" people to watch very specific-typically partisan-content (Arceneaux et al., 2013) or allow them to select from a limited content pool (Arceneaux et al., 2013;de Benedictis-Kessner et al., 2019;Stroud et al., 2019). These designs cannot approximate actual media consumption contexts, where people can use a nearly unlimited number of sources, and are likely to overestimate media effects on the tested outcomes (Gerber et al., 2011). ...
Democratic theorists and the public emphasize the centrality of news media to a well-functioning society. Yet, there are reasons to believe that news exposure can have a range of largely overlooked detrimental effects. This preregistered project examines news exposure effects on desirable outcomes, i.e., political knowledge, participation, and support for compromise, and detrimental outcomes, i.e., attitude and affective polarization, negative system perceptions, and worsened individual well-being. We rely on two complementary over-time experiments that combine participants’ survey self-reports and their behavioral browsing data: one that incentivized participants to take a ’news vacation’ for a week (N = 803; 6M visits) in the US, the other to ‘news binge’ for 2 weeks (N = 939; 4M visits) in Poland. Across both experiments, we demonstrate that reducing or increasing news exposure has no impact on the positive or negative outcomes tested. These null effects emerge irrespective of participants’ prior levels of news consumption and whether prior news diet was like-minded, and regardless of compliance levels. We argue that these findings reflect the reality of limited news exposure in the real world, with news exposure comprising on average roughly 3% of citizens’ online information diet.
... Optimized for user preferences, recommender systems increase exposure to news that users want to know, which may come at the cost of what users should know from a normative point of view (Diakopoulos 2019;Nechushtai and Lewis 2019). While little evidence of filter bubbles in online news environments is found (Haim, Graefe, and Brosius 2018;Mummolo 2016), users' selective exposure and avoidance of opposing views could reinforce particular politicized stances (de Benedictis-Kessner et al. 2019;Hellmueller, Lischka, and Humprecht 2020;Peterson, Goel, and Iyengar 2021). Such user behavior may lead to political polarization, which preference-based recommender systems could further enhance. ...
News recommender systems provide a technological architecture that helps shaping public discourse. Following a normative approach to news recommender system design, we test utility and external effects of a diversity-aware news recommender algorithm. In an experimental study using a custom-built news app, we show that diversity-optimized recommendations (1) perform similar to methods optimizing for user preferences regarding user utility, (2) that diverse news recommendations are related to a higher tolerance for opposing views, especially for politically conservative users, and (3) that diverse news recommender systems may nudge users towards preferring news with differing or even opposing views. We conclude that diverse news recommendations can have a depolarizing capacity for democratic societies.
... Third, our study design does not allow us to observe effects on health behaviour; future studies should test whether fact-checks affect compliance with public health recommendations. Fourth, we used a design in which respondents were not allowed to select the information to which they were exposed; future research should incorporate designs that allow us to estimate the effects of fact-check exposure when people can choose the information they consume 37 . Fifth, we find no evidence that repeated exposure to an identical message from an unspecified source increases its effects on beliefs but future research should test if such exposure would have greater effects if the message was delivered by multiple sources. ...
Widespread misperceptions about COVID-19 and the novel coronavirus threaten to exacerbate the severity of the pandemic. We conducted preregistered survey experiments in the United States, Great Britain and Canada examining the effectiveness of fact-checks that seek to correct these false or unsupported beliefs. Across three countries with differing levels of political conflict over the pandemic response, we demonstrate that fact-checks reduce targeted misperceptions, especially among the groups who are most vulnerable to these claims, and have minimal spillover effects on the accuracy of related beliefs. However, these reductions in COVID-19 misperception beliefs do not persist over time in panel data even after repeated exposure. These results suggest that fact-checks can successfully change the COVID-19 beliefs of the people who would benefit from them most but that their effects are ephemeral.
... Though the opportunity for exposure and attention to polarising information on digital, social, and mobile media is high, the power and nature of its impact remains in question. First, ceiling effects due to already high rates of affective polarisation help to explain why there is less evidence demonstrating the persuasive or polarising effects of echo chambers (e.g., Peterson et al., 2018, but see De Benedictis-Kessner et al., 2019). Second, exposure to oppositional views among partisans strengthens existing predispositions (Bail et al., 2018); it does not increase tolerance and compromise as commonly theorised. ...
... Considerably more is known now than a decade ago, when many of these technologies were in their infancy. However, efforts to understand the implications of changing communication technology for media effects have produced mixed findings and made limited progress towards a cohesive and generalisable theoretical explanation, despite advances in research design and methodologies increasingly equipped to study these phenomena (e.g., De Benedictis-Kessner et al., 2019). Why? ...
... If echo chambers or partisan news exposure do have an effect on either like-minded or oppositional partisans, the attitudinal or behavioural influence would likely be minimal, reinforcing already held beliefs. Very few studies fully confront these kinds of ceiling effects, or deal directly with attitudinal change and behavioural consequences (but see De Benedictis-Kessner et al., 2019 andPeterson et al., 2018 ). ...
Today’s information environment is drastically different from the heyday of print and broadcast, but these changes exceed the scope of researchers’ agendas. More is known now than when these technologies were in their infancy, yet efforts to understand the implications of changing communication technology for media effects have produced mixed findings, limiting progress towards cohesive and generalisable theoretical explanations. A literature review suggests one reason for this is that media effects scholarship has often neglected insights from political psychology and information processing, contributing to a lack of theoretical coherence across these bodies of work. Though research thoroughly examines directional motivations dictating media choice and exposure, it does not equally consider other cognitive biases driving choice, exposure, and processing, which can offset effects from the structural aspects of digital media. Given ample evidence that communication technology influences information processing, any viable, contemporary explanation of media effects must reconcile with these literatures.
