Men and Women Read News Differently

Abstract

This study explored how the structure of written news affects men and women differently in terms of cognition. In a 2 (Structure) × 2 (Story) × 2 (Sex) mixed design, participants read two inverted pyramid and two chronological news stories, each on a different topic. Dependent measures included secondary task reaction times (STRTs), cued recall, recognition accuracy, and text comprehension. Women had slower reaction times than men across stories, but a significant interaction showed their use of cognitive resources was less affected by variations in story structure. These results are discussed in the context of a comprehensibility interpretation of the STRT measure. The findings suggest that the common use of the inverted pyramid structure, which has been criticized as difficult to comprehend, may not explain the decrease in female news readers.

Effects of online commenter sex cues and news receiver sex on commenter credibility

“…Our results to RQ2, indicating females in general were likely to consider commenters to be more credible, also is consistent with past research. Females may be more invested and engaged when constructing meaning from the text (Sternadori & Wise, 2010), and thus in the study they may have allocated relatively more cognitive resources to process even short texts like ORCs after considering the comments to be important to read, as the study instructed them to read them. Because society generally expects females to have more compassion and sensitivity, females may be more likely to present themselves as empathic (Eisenberg & Lennon, 1983).…”

“…The sex of the news receiver has been shown to affect what types of news stories an individual is interested in, finding that male viewers tend to have a negative bias, and gravitate toward news stories that are more negative, whereas females avoid negative news stories and show more arousal with positively framed news stories (Grabe & Kamhawi, 2006). Females (vs. males) may also be more invested in building meaning from text (Sternadori & Wise, 2010).…”