When Unfamiliarity Breeds Contempt: How Partisan Selective Exposure Sustains Oppositional Media Hostility

Peterson, Erik; Kagalwala, Ali

doi:10.1017/s0003055420001124

Cited by 28 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…As we consider media outlet reputations, our framework is also helpful for studying the origins of hostile attitudes towards political news media and our evidence aligns with other accounts about the role of attacks from political elites, more so than any negative responses to news coverage itself, in generating antipathy towards the media (Ladd 2010, Archer 2020, Peterson and Kagalwala 2021.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 58%

“Stick to Sports”: Evidence from Sports Media on the Origins and Consequences of Newly Politicized Attitudes

Peterson

Muñoz

2022

Political Communication

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Politics now intrudes into many aspects of social life. How does this occur and what are its consequences? We study the sources of politicized attitudes towards ESPN, a sports media outlet involved in controversies where politics and sports intersect, and consider their implications for sports news use. We assess two potential contributors to politicized attitudes towards ESPN: exposure to political media criticizing the network and encounters with its sports coverage. In survey-linked web browsing data and a survey experiment, exposure to political media led the public to evaluate ESPN in political terms, showing messages from political elites can a↵ect opinions of entertainment media. In contrast, exposure to ESPN's typical sports coverage failed to alter views of the network. We also find these newly politicized attitudes do not reduce use of ESPN, demonstrating the intrusion of politics into a seemingly apolitical setting may not displace other considerations underlying behavior.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 58%

“Stick to Sports”: Evidence from Sports Media on the Origins and Consequences of Newly Politicized Attitudes

Peterson

Muñoz

2022

Political Communication

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“…Second, research on political perceptions shows that partisans tend to believe supporters of the rival party hold more extreme partisan views [13,14] and stereotypical qualities [15] than they do in reality. This pattern is thought to be driven, at least in part, by partisan media environments that highlight negative and extreme views of the outparty [16,17,18,19,20,21]. Inaccurate perceptions of rival partisans could lead Americans to believe outpartisans have more extreme views about supporting and engaging in partisan violence than they do in reality.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Correcting Inaccurate Metaperceptions Reduces Americans’ Support for Partisan Violence

Mernyk¹,

Pink²,

Willer³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Scholars, policy makers, and the general public have expressed growing concern about the possibility of large-scale political violence in the United States. These worries find support in studies revealing that many American partisans support the use of violence against rival partisans. Here we propose that support for partisan violence is based in part on greatly exaggerated perceptions of rival partisans’ support for violence. We also predict that correcting these inaccurate “metaperceptions” can reduce partisans’ own support for partisan violence. We test these hypotheses in a series of pre-registered, nationally representative, correlational, longitudinal, and experimental studies (total n = 4,741), collected both before and after the 2020 U.S. Presidential election and the 2021 U.S. Capitol attack. In Studies 1 and 2 we found that both Democrats’ and Republicans’ perceptions of their rival partisans’ support for violence and willingness to engage in violence were very inaccurate, with estimates ranging from 239% to 489% higher than actual levels. Further, we find that a brief, informational correction of these misperceptions reduced support for violence by 37% (Study 3) and willingness to engage in violence by 44% (Study 4). In the latter study, a follow-up survey revealed the correction continued to significantly reduce support for violence approximately one month following the study. Together, these results suggest that support for partisan violence in the United States stems in part from systematic overestimations of rival partisans’ support for violence, and that correcting these misperceptions can durably reduce support for partisan violence in the mass public.

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“…These behaviors have been explained by selective exposure theory and confirmation bias in social sciences. Other works have found that reinforcement of strong beliefs is weaker in individuals with moderate viewpoints, or in case of two-sided neutral debates and cross-cutting exposure [21,27,43], as explained by social science concepts like moderation theory and cross-cutting discussions.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The exchange of ideas among people with politically dissimilar groups is known as cross-cutting discussions. Research in this field has shown that awareness of rationales for oppositional viewpoints increases with the exposure to disagreement, and that affective polarization is negatively related to involvement in cross-cutting discussions [37,43]. This implies that greater network diversity reduces polarization by facilitating cross-cutting discussions.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Random Walks with Erasure: Diversifying Personalized Recommendations on Social and Information Networks

Paudel

Bernstein

2021

Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021

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Most existing personalization systems promote items that match a user's previous choices or those that are popular among similar users. This results in recommendations that are highly similar to the ones users are already exposed to, resulting in their isolation inside familiar but insulated information silos. In this context, we develop a novel recommendation framework with a goal of improving information diversity using a modified random walk exploration of the user-item graph. We focus on the problem of political content recommendation, while addressing a general problem applicable to personalization tasks in other social and information networks.For recommending political content on social networks, we first propose a new model to estimate the ideological positions for both users and the content they share, which is able to recover ideological positions with high accuracy. Based on these estimated positions, we generate diversified personalized recommendations using our new random-walk based recommendation algorithm. With experimental evaluations on large datasets of Twitter discussions, we show that our method based on random walks with erasure is able to generate more ideologically diverse recommendations. Our approach does not depend on the availability of labels regarding the bias of users or content producers. With experiments on open benchmark datasets from other social and information networks, we also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in recommending diverse long-tail items.

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When Unfamiliarity Breeds Contempt: How Partisan Selective Exposure Sustains Oppositional Media Hostility

Cited by 28 publications

References 79 publications

“Stick to Sports”: Evidence from Sports Media on the Origins and Consequences of Newly Politicized Attitudes

“Stick to Sports”: Evidence from Sports Media on the Origins and Consequences of Newly Politicized Attitudes

Correcting Inaccurate Metaperceptions Reduces Americans’ Support for Partisan Violence

Random Walks with Erasure: Diversifying Personalized Recommendations on Social and Information Networks

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