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Self-expression just a click away: Source interactivity impacts on confirmation bias and political attitudes

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Highlights

  • An experiment examined source interactivity (SI: up-/down-voting) impacts on confirmation bias and attitude reinforcement.

  • Custom programmed research software presented political messages and SI while logging voting and selective exposure.

  • SI (ability to up- or down-vote messages) reduced the confirmation bias.

  • Independent of exposure, voting on messages in line with prior attitudes reinforced attitudes.

Abstract

Information is now commonly consumed online, often displayed in conjunction with self-expression affordances (i.e., likes, votes) that create a sense of “self as source.” Sundar et al.’s (2015) theory of interactive media effects (TIME) conceptualizes such affordances as source interactivity (SI). An experiment examined medium effects of SI as well as message effects on attitudes. It tracked selective exposure to attitude-consistent vs. –discrepant political messages, to capture confirmation bias, and manipulated SI presence (affordance to up-vote or down-vote articles present or absent) as within-subjects factors. SI use and attitude change were captured. SI reduced selective exposure to attitude-consistent content. However, use of SI affected attitude reinforcement independently as well. Hence, users shaped their own attitudes both by selectively reading articles and expressing their views through SI. Directions for theory development are offered.

Section snippets

Confirmation bias in selective exposure and attitudinal consequences

As the terms confirmation bias and selective exposure have sometimes been used synonymously in the literature, it should be clarified here that the present investigation considers the confirmation bias to be a specific pattern of selective exposure, with the latter being a broader and multilayered concept (Knobloch-Westerwick, Westerwick, & Sude, 2020). Selective exposure can be defined as “any systematic bias in selected messages that diverges from the composition of accessible messages” (

Impacts from source interactivity

The term source interactivity (SI) captures the ability of users to express themselves on media via interactive features. It builds on Sundar et al.’s (2015) notion of self-expression that describes how users utilize interactive features on a website for customizability, as well as gatekeeping for others (e.g., blogging and social bookmarking). Potentially, the seemingly superficial click to voice a reaction to a political online message matters substantially for one's own political views.

Method

A 2 × 4 x 2 selective exposure experiment featured attitude consistency (AC; attitude-consistent vs. attitude-discrepant), topic (on four issues), and SI presence (SIP; present vs. absent) as within-subjects factors. Participants browsed four iterations of an online news platform for 3 min each. Each iteration covered a different political topic. Two iterations were randomly assigned to have SI present - wherein participants could click on “up-vote” and “down-vote” arrows next to article leads

Impact of SI presence on reinforcement (H1)

To test H1, first, a repeated measures ANOVA was conducted to examine the main effect of SI condition on attitude reinforcement (averaged across relevant websites). To isolate the impact of experimental condition, this model did not include covariates. There was no difference in average reinforcement between SI conditions (p = .881). To test the robustness of this finding, a multi-level regression model with random intercepts by participant (4 observations per participant, corresponding to each

Discussion

Much hope existed that the internet would invigorate political deliberation, as desirable for democracies, but on the other hand, concerns exist that this landscape of interactive use of public affairs information leads societies into unprecedented levels of polarization and intolerance (Dahlgren, 2005). Clearly, online interfaces are changing how people consume political information and news (Lee & Tandoc, 2017; Thorson & Wells, 2016), as users can provide direct feedback on articles in the

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Daniel J. Sude: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization. George D.H. Pearson: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - original draft. Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick: Conceptualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing.

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