by is Mooney
To answer it—thereby showing the interaction between media change on the one hand, and conservative psychology on the other—we’ll first need to travel once again back to the 1950s, and the pioneering work of the psychologist and Seekers infiltrator, Leon Festinger.
In his 1957 book A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Festinger built on his study of Mrs. Keech and the Seekers, and other research, to lay out many ramifications of his core idea about why we contort the evidence to fit to our beliefs, rather than conforming our beliefs to the evidence. That included a prediction about how those who are highly committed to a belief or view should go about seeking information that touches on that powerful conviction.
Festinger suggested that once we’ve settled on a core belief, this ought to shape how we gather information. More specifically, we are likely to try to avoid encountering claims and information that challenge that belief, because these will create cognitive dissonance. Instead, we should go looking for information that affirms the belief. The technical (and less than ideal) term for this phenomenon is “selective exposure”: what it means is that we selectively choose to be exposed to information that is congenial to our beliefs, and to avoid “inconvenient truths” that are uncongenial to them. Or as one group of early researchers put it, in language notable for its tone of wrecked idealism:
In recent years there has been a good deal of talk by men of good will about the desirability and necessity of guaranteeing the free exchange of ideas in the market place of public opinion. Such talk has centered upon the problem of keeping free the channels of expression and communication. Now we find that the consumers of ideas, if they have made a decision on the issue, themselves erect high tariff walls against alien notions.
Selective exposure is generally thought to occur on the individual level—e.g., one person chooses to watch Fox News. But when we think about conservative Christian homeschooling or the constant battles over the teaching of controversial issues in public schools—where authoritarian parents seek to skew curricula to prevent their children from hearing threatening things—a kind of selective exposure is also on full display. The only difference is that it’s selective exposure of information for someone else. It’s parents trying to control what their children are exposed to, actively seeking to blind the next generation rather than themselves.
Selective exposure theory grows out of the cognitive dissonance tradition, but the concept of erecting “tariff walls” against inconvenient truths gels with the theory of motivated reasoning as well. As Charles Taber of Stony Brook University explains, motivated reasoning makes us susceptible to all manner of confirmation biases—seeking or greatly emphasizing evidence that supports our views and predispositions—and disconfirmation biases—attacking information that threatens us. In this context, “selective exposure” might be considered a certain breed of “confirmation bias,” one involving our media choices in particular. (As we’ll see, the theory of motivated reasoning also implies that “selective exposure” may operate, at least in part, on a subconscious and emotional level that we’re not even aware of.)
If Festinger’s ideas about “selective exposure” are correct, then I was wise to be cautious, earlier, about whether the chief problem with Fox News is that it is actively causing its viewers to be misinformed. It’s very possible that Fox could be imparting misinformation even as politically conservative viewers are also seeking the station out—highly open to it and already convinced about many falsehoods that dovetail with their beliefs. Thus, they would come into the encounter with Fox not only misinformed and predisposed to become more so, but inclined to be very confident about their incorrect beliefs and to impart them to others. In this account, political misinformation on the right would be driven by a kind of feedback loop, with both Fox and its viewers making the problem worse.
Psychologists and political scientists have extensively studied selective exposure, and within the research literature, the findings are often described as mixed. But that’s not quite right. In truth, some early studies seeking to confirm Festinger’s speculation had problems with their designs and often failed—and as a result, explains University of Alabama psychologist William Hart, the field of selective exposure research “stagnated” for several decades. But it has since undergone a dramatic revival—driven, not surprisingly, by the modern explosion of media choices and growing political polarization in the U.S. And thanks to a new wave of better-designed and more rigorous studies, the concept has become well established.
“Selective exposure is the clearest way to look at how people create their own realities, based upon their views of the world,” says Hart. “Everybody knows this happens.”
The first wave of selective exposure research, much of it conducted during the 1960s, resulted in the drawing of one key distinction that we must keep in mind. Even in cases where the sorting of people into friendly information channels had been demonstrated, critics questioned whether the study subjects were actively and deliberately building “tariff walls” to protect their beliefs. Rather, they suggested that selective exposure might be de facto: People might encounter more information that supports their personal views not because they actively seek it, but because they live in communities or have lifestyle patterns that strongly tilt the odds in favor of such encounters happening in the first place.
Thus, if you live in a “red state,” Fox News is more likely to be on the TV in public places—bars, waiting rooms—than if you live in a “blue state.” And your peers and neighbors are much more likely to be watching it and talking about it. Anyone who travels around America will notice this, rendering the distinction between de facto and what we might call motivated selective exposure an important one.
However, more modern studies of selective exposure are explicitly designed to rule out the possibility of de facto explanations. As a result, by 2009, Hart and a team of researchers were able to perform a meta-analysis—a statistically rigorous overview of published studies on selective exposure—that deliberately omitted these problematic research papers. That still left behind 67 relevant studies, encompassing almost 8,000 individuals, and by pooling them together Hart found that people overall were nearly twice as likely to consume ideologically congenial information as to consume ideologically inconvenient information—and in certain circumstances, they were even more likely than that. That’s not to say nobody ever goes seeking what political science wonks sometimes call “counterattitudinal” information—often they do. But it’s rarer, overall, than seeking friendly information.
When are people most likely to seek out self-affirming information? Hart found that they’re most vulnerable to selective exposure if they have defensive goals—for instance, being highly committed to a preexisting view, and especially a view that is tied to a person’s core values. Just as Festinger predicted, then, defensive motivations increase the “risk,” so to speak, of engaging in selective exposure.
One defensive motivation identified in Hart’s study was closed-mindedness, which makes a great deal of sense. It is probably part of the definition of being closed-minded, or dogmatic, that you prefer to consume information that agrees with what you already believe.
Knowing that political conservatives tend to have a higher need for closure—especially right-wing authoritarians, who are increasingly prevalent in the Republican Party—this suggests they should also be more likely to select themselves into belief-affirming information streams, like Fox News or right-wing talk radio or the Drudge Report. Indeed, a number of research results support this idea.
In a study of selective exposure during the 2000 election, for instance, Stanford University’s Shanto Iyengar and his colleagues mailed a multimedia informational CD about the two candidates—Bush and Gore—to 600 registered voters and then tracked its use by a sample of 220 of them. As a result, they found that Bush partisans chose to consume more information about Bush than about Gore—but Democrats and liberals didn’t show the same bias toward their own candi
date.
Selective exposure has also been directly tested several times in authoritarians. In one case, researchers at Stony Brook University primed more and less authoritarian subjects with thoughts of their own mortality. Afterwards, the authoritarians showed a much stronger preference than non-authoritarians for reading an article that supported their existing view on the death penalty, rather than an article presenting the opposing view or a “balanced” take on the issue. As the authors concluded: “highly authoritarian individuals, when threatened, attempt to reduce anxiety by selectively exposing themselves to attitude-validating information, which leads to ‘stronger’ opinions that are more resistant to attitude change.”
The aforementioned Robert Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba has also documented an above average amount of selective exposure in right wing authoritarians. In one case, he gave students a fake self-esteem test, in which they randomly received either above average or below average scores. Then, everyone—the receivers of both low and high scores—was given the opportunity to say whether he or she would like to read a summary of why the test was valid. The result was striking: Students who scored low on authoritarianism wanted to learn about the validity of the test regardless of how they did on it. There was virtually no difference between high and low test scorers. But among the authoritarian students, there was a big gap: 73 percent of those who got high self-esteem scores wanted to read about the test’s validity, while only 47 percent of those who got low self-esteem scores did.
Altemeyer did it again, too, in another study. This time, as part of a series of larger studies on prejudice and ethnocentrism, he asked 493 students the following question:
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you are less accepting, less tolerant and more prejudiced against minority groups than are most of the other students serving in this experiment. Would you want to find this out, say by having the Experimenter bring individual sheets to your class, showing each student privately his/her prejudice score compared with the rest of the class?
Right-wing authoritarians tend to be highly prejudiced and intolerant. But their response to this question also showed that compared with those who were less authoritarian, they didn’t want to learn this about themselves. Only 55 percent of Altemeyer’s authoritarians wanted to find out about their degree of prejudice, compared with 76 percent of his students rating low on authoritarianism. And the difference held up when the test was performed in a slightly different way, with an even larger group of students. When Altemeyer gave half of the students the opportunity to learn if they were more prejudiced, and the other half the opportunity to learn if they were less prejudiced, the authoritarians were much more likely to want to hear the good news about themselves, but not to hear the bad—selective exposure in action. The non-authoritarians, again, wanted the information either way.
Authoritarians, Altemeyer concludes, “maintain their beliefs against challenges by limiting their experiences, and surrounding themselves with sources of information that will tell them they are right.”
The evidence on selective exposure, as well as the clear links between closed-mindedness and authoritarianism, gives good grounds for believing that this phenomenon should be more common and more powerful on the political right. Lest we leap to the conclusion that Fox News is actively misinforming its viewers most of the time—rather than enabling them through its very existence—that’s something to bear in mind.
And if selective exposure will be worse among authoritarians, it will probably be worse still among authoritarians who are also political sophisticates—because, just like motivated reasoning, selective exposure appears to be worse among sophisticates in general.
In a powerful motivated reasoning study that also examined selective exposure, Charles Taber and Milton Lodge of Stony Brook gave their test subjects—whose political views and basic political literacy had already been measured—the opportunity to read information that either supported or challenged their views on affirmative action and gun control. In the experiment, the participants had to actively choose which positions to read on the issues, and those positions were identified with a well known and clearly political source—the Republican Party and the National Rifle Association on gun control, the Democratic Party and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on affirmative action, and so on.
Overall, the test subjects showed a clear tendency to choose friendly information over unfriendly information. But the effect was much stronger among the “sophisticates,” those who had scored higher on a test of basic civic and political literacy. These Einsteins chose to read congenial and self-affirming arguments 70 to 75 percent of the time. In the gun control case, for instance, sophisticated opponents of gun control chose to read arguments from the NRA or Republican Party 6 times for every 2 times they sought to read arguments from the other side (the Democratic Party or Citizens Against Handguns).
In other words, if you know a lot about a topic—or, if you think you do—this suggests you’re more likely to only consume information that is friendly to your views. Insofar as Fox viewers are highly self-confident conservative sophisticates, we have another reason for thinking that selective exposure is a key factor in driving the Fox misinformation effect.
One intriguing question is whether the inclination to engage in selective exposure occurs automatically and subconsciously, the result of emotional responses that occur outside of our awareness.
There’s little doubt that a constantly repeated behavior—like watching a particular television station—can become more or less unconscious over time. “It can be just pure habit, like driving to work in the morning, you don’t even realize how you got there, you’re just there,” says Hart. “You grab your coffee and you turn on Fox, that’s what your thought process is.”
On a first or early encounter, Fox News could also be emotionally appealing at a level prior to consciousness awareness. The attraction wouldn’t necessarily come from argumentative substance—although it might—but perhaps from imagery and tone. Thus, Fox’s constant displays of American flags, and the firm and confident bombast of its hosts, might strike a psychologically pleasing note for conservatives who are flipping through the channels. Slowly that may then bleed over into consciousness, as a person becomes aware of becoming a regular Fox viewer.
The end result, according to Stony Brook’s Charles Taber, is that selective exposure probably emerges from a blend of subconscious and conscious mental operations—and of course, even our seemingly “conscious” media choices are inseparable from our emotions. “To say that these processes are triggered automatically does not mean that we are not aware of the feelings, motivations, and beliefs that are so triggered,” Taber explains. “It is when we become aware of these things that we have the subjective sense of choosing to watch some media and avoid others, but in most cases I would claim these conscious decisions are rationalizations of inclinations that were set in motion outside of awareness.”
And then, when the phone rings for a survey, people can not only identify themselves as Fox viewers, but they may deliver some pretty colorful answers to the questions asked.
But there’s another crucial ingredient involved in selective exposure, a plainly environmental one. In order to actively decide to consume information from a congenial source, such a source must be readily available to you. You must have the choice. An extreme hypothetical can serve to illustrate the point: By definition, a political conservative living in an environment that only offers liberal media sources cannot engage in selective exposure.
“The more information that people are given, research suggests that the chance of engaging in selective exposure becomes greater,” says the University of Alabama’s William Hart. What this means is that over time, the American political environment (the “oven”) has become far more conducive to selective exposure—because media choices have simply exploded since the 1980s. That’s especially so for choices offering political fare.
> It’s not just cable, whose onset obliterated the old alphabet soup monopoly enjoyed by ABC, CBS, PBS, and NBC, and gave us CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC (and the Food Network!). And it’s not just the Internet—although that’s a particularly ripe environment for selective exposure, since it offers the most choices, as well as plenty of ideological ones.
But consider another case: Conservative talk radio, the emergence of which was probably sped along by the Reagan Federal Communications Commission’s 1987 decision to do away with the “Fairness Doctrine,” which had previously required broadcasters both to cover controversial issues, and also to air different perspectives on them. Whatever the logic behind killing this rule, it surely was not based on a modern understanding of the political brain and its biases.
During the 1990s, conservative talk radio flourished, offering a powerful mix of entertainment and explicitly ideological commentary. And as scholars began to study this medium, they unveiled results that will sound familiar.
First, conservative talk-radio listeners were found to be political sophisticates—more heavily focused on political issues, wealthier, more likely to read the newspaper. And yet at the same time, they were found to be highly misinformed. Indeed, in a study by David Barker, C. Richard Hofstetter of San Diego State University, and several colleagues, it was found that “exposure to conservative political talk shows was related to increased misinformation, while exposure to moderate political talk shows was related to decreased levels of political misinformation, after controlling for other variables.” For anyone who understands the “smart idiots” effect, that makes perfect sense.
What were conservative talk-radio listeners misinformed about in the 1990s? It’s a bit of a trip down memory lane, but one that illuminates a key transitional stage leading to our current misinformation environment. They wrongly believed that “Growth in the budget deficit has increased during the Clinton presidency” and that “Teaching about religious observations is illegal in public schools,” as well as that teen pregnancy was on the rise and that student test scores were declining—all part and parcel of a right-wing narrative about America, but not actually true. They also believed several myths about welfare reform, a top issue in the Clinton era: e.g., “Most people are on welfare because they do not want to work”; and “America spends more on welfare than on defense.”
