[1] R. K. Garrett, “Echo chambers online?: Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users,” J. Comput. Commun., vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 265–285, 2009.
[2] P. Resnick, R. Garrett, and T. Kriplean, “Bursting your (filter) bubble: strategies for promoting diverse exposure,” Proc. …, pp. 95–100, 2013.
The first paper talks about selective exposure in great detail. The novelty that is presented in this paper is concerning the opinion challenge avoidance with the explanation “that people’s desire for opinion reinforcement is stronger than their aversion to opinion challenges”. The best way to capture the entirety of the argument is to present the different hypotheses of the paper as the authors present that to be the goal and set out to defend them.
H1: The more opinion-reinforcing information an individual expects a news story to contain, the more likely he or she is to look at it.
H2: The more opinion-reinforcing information a news story contains, the more time an individual will spend viewing it.
H3: The more opinion-challenging information the reader expects a news story to contain, the less likely he or she is to look at it.
H3a: The influence of opinion-challenging information on the decision to look at a news story will be smaller than the influence of opinion-reinforcing information.
H4: The more opinion-challenging information a news story contains, the more time the individual will spend viewing it.
This is reminiscent of a set of design principles that every practitioner is asked to follow, the Gestalt Principles. They are:
- Similarity
- Continuation
- Closure
- Proximity
- Figure and ground
The above principles can be interpreted to fit the current context. Humans generally try to find similarity in information to perceive information. They also always form a mental model about most subjects and task which they try and associate to the real world. In the current context, this can be related to the first hypothesis which is reaffirmed by the cognitive dissonance theory as well. Humans have the tendency to see continuity in information, even when it might not inherently exist. This is along the same lines of thought of hypothesis 3a where the influence of opinion-reinforcing information is assumed to have more influence than opinion-challenging ones. The fact that humans always try to find closure, which I would link to trying to read between the lines, is reflected in the fourth hypothesis as people generally want to know the whole story just so that they can twist it to their own narrative when necessary. The second hypothesis can be directly linked to proximity and figure and ground, in a way could be said to map to the third hypothesis as we always see what we want to as the figure and dissociate the rest to be the ground.
In general, when I try and dissect the paper there are few queries that I am left with.
- Why were the subjects not allowed to go back once their answers were submitted on a page? Would it not reveal that a participant is disinterested in going with the fact that the paper states is a dichotomous variable?
- What was the rationale with the 15 minutes? Since the entire study was carefully planned out, was there a test done to determine the time allotment for the participants?
- With the demographics of the audience as a definite skewing factor on the user data, why was no matching conducted to normalize the data to make it more representative?
A few supporting theories that I was reminded of was Group Thinking. This was presented in a book by Irving Janis in 1982 where the idea of an individual being overridden by that of the group is explained. It is relevant here as this explains how some people might be so involved in thinking in a particular way that even if they genuinely believe in an article that is opinion-challenging they just might not go with it. Another one is the paper by Z. Kunda on Motivated Reasoning. Here the author talks about how people just search for things that confirm and reaffirm what they already believe rather than searching for the actual truth.
This is a good transition to the second conference panel paper which we read on diverse exposure. This is essentially a proponent of ways to ensure that we do not have selective exposure. Though most of the panel papers background is already discussed above, the suggestion of using engagement tools like ConsiderIt, Reflect and OpinionSpace are very interesting. At the end of this reading, I have a couple of questions which I am hoping to get people’s opinion on.
- Should social and news media nudge users to have diverse exposure? If yes, how much?
- Does educating people about selective exposure solve this problem?
DISCLAIMER: I ask these under the assumption that diverse exposure is good.
