Tecnologías de información y comunicación TIC

In recent years, new research has begun to emerge looking at selective exposure in more ‘naturalistic’ settings - making use of survey data and/or online behaviour. In

combination with lab experiments of selective exposure, this can help to shed some light on when and to what extent people tend to actively seek out, and/or become passively

exposed to, information that validates their already held beliefs.

Stroud (2007) argues that topics like politics are more likely to inspire selective exposure

than others, and that research needs to look more at habitual media exposure patterns, rather than single decisions (as is often done in the lab.) Stroud uses data from the

2004National Annenberg Election Survey which asked people about both their political leanings and their habitual media use (including newspapers, political talk radio, cable

news, and political websites), to investigate whether views influence media use. The data suggests such an influence - 64% of conservative Republicans report consuming

some survey respondents not consuming any political media at all), and 76% of liberal Democrats report consuming at least one liberal outlet while only 43% of conservative

Republicans say the same. Similarly, Gil de Z´u˜niga et al. (2012) use US national survey data (collected between December 2008 and January 2009 by a research unit at the

University of Texas Austin) and find that the more conservative a person is, the more inclined they will be to watch Fox news (r=.38,p < .0001), and the less likely they will be to watch CNN (r=-.18, p < 0.001) - and that correspondingly, the more liberal a person is, the more likely they will be to watch CNN and the less likely to watch Fox

News.

A general limitation of using survey data like this is that it is often only correlational.

This means that even if we find a relationship between political views and media con- sumption, we can’t conclude that people’s political views are definitely causing them to seek out certain kinds of media - it’s also possible that instead exposure to certain media sources leads people to form the corresponding political views. Though Gil de

Z´u˜niga et al. (2012) suffer from this problem, Stroud (2007) does use a strategy of panel analyses to attempt to determine causality. By including a lagged measure of the de-

pendent variable (media exposure) it is possible to evaluate whether the independent variable (political views) has a causal effect on the dependent variable. The survey data

used in this study contains measures of media use at two different times during the 2004 presidential campaign, which makes this kind of analysis possible. Stroud finds that

people’s political beliefs are significant predictors of what media outlets they suggest at the later time, even after controlling for their selections at the earlier time: providing

more evidence for a causal effect of political attitudes on information selection.

Conover et al. (2011) look at networks of political communication on Twitter - amassing

over 250,000 tweets from the six weeks leading up to the 2010 US congressional midterm elections. They show that the network of political retweets exhibits a “highly segregated

partisan structure, with extremely limited connectivity between left- and right- leaning users.” (Conover et al., 2011, p.89) This suggests both some degree of active selective

exposure - people are more likely to engage with those who have similar political views to them - and passive selective exposure - due to the nature of these networks, people

will end up more easily exposed to supportive viewpoints even without displaying an active preference for them. Himelboim et al. (2013) also look at connections on Twit- ter among users talking about the US president’s state of the union speech in 2012.

They find that users participate in “fragmented interactions and form divided groups, in which people tune into a narrow segment of the wider range of politically oriented

information sources.” (Himelboim et al., 2013, p.195) Groups and networks seem to form in such a way that people generally expose themselves to sources and information

that disproportionately support what they already believe.

Several studies also report quasi-experimental evidence looking at how people select dif-

ferent information, particularly news sources. Iyengar and Hahn (2009) find that, when given an explicit choice, conservatives tend to prefer to read news reports attributed to

Fox News and to avoid news from CNN and NPR, while liberals exhibit the opposite preference. Here, it seems like the source of information is key - people aren’t simply

choosing to read arguments they expect to agree with, but rather are choosing to read arguments from sources they trust or like (perhaps indirectly because those sources tend

to agree with them.) There is a complex question here of when it is rational for me to distrust a certain source of information, which we will return to later.

Garrett (2009) conducts an online study with subjects recruited from two partisan news websites, and tracks their choices of news items and time spent reading (with a sample

of 727 subjects, substantially larger than many past selective exposure studies.) Results indicate weak evidence for selective exposure - the news articles that subjects selected

were more likely to be opinion-reinforcing than those they did not select, but there was no evidence that people made any active effort to avoid opinion-challenging information.

Building on this, Garrett et al. (2011) challenge the claim that avoidance of opinion- challenging information is becoming increasingly common over time. They show, using

data from a series of national RDD surveys between 2004 and 2008, that Americans’ use of attitude-consistent political sources is positively correlated with the use of more

challenging sources. Though people may be seeking out more and more information that confirms their beliefs, but they are not necessarily driven to avoid attitude-challenging

information they may simply be seeking out more information on the topic in general.