This research investigated how voters select, process, are affected by, and recall political information in a dynamic campaign environment. It was hypothesized that voters' information selection, processing, and recall are subject to a negativity bias (i.e., negative information dominates over positive information), a congruency bias (i.e., positive information about the preferred candidate and negative information about the opponent candidate dominate over negative information about the preferred candidate and positive information about the opponent), and a candidate bias (i.e., information about the preferred candidate dominates over information about the opponent). Motivated by an initial candidate preference, participants were also expected to develop more polarized candidate evaluations over time. Participants were exposed to quickly changing information in the form of newspaper-style headlines on a dynamic, computer-based information board. The results generally supported negativity bias and candidate bias, whereas congruency bias was only found during information recall. At the information selection and processing stages, participants with a strong initial candidate preference showed a disproportionate preference for negative information about the preferred candidate. However, they developed more positive attitudes at the evaluation and recall stage. This finding suggests that participants were engaged in motivated information processing by counterarguing negative information about their preferred candidate.

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Regarding the effect of the third‐person perception on censorship attitudes, the present study first highlighted logical weaknesses of previously proposed rationales and limitations of previously used statistical models to test the effect. This study reanalyzed data from past research on the effect of the third‐person perception. In Study 1, the average effects of the other‐self perceptual gap in the media influence on censorship attitudes were estimated based on reports from 13 previous studies (total N = 6,414). Study 2 reanalyzed Schmierbach, Boyle, Xu, and McLeod's (2011) correlational data (N = 692). The results of these two studies showed that the presumed effect on others is a stronger predictor of censorship attitudes than the other‐self differential in perceived media effect.

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