THINKING FAST AND FURIOUS EMOTIONAL INTENSITY AND OPINION POLARIZATION IN ONLINE MEDIA
THINKING FAST AND FURIOUS EMOTIONAL INTENSITY AND OPINION POLARIZATION IN ONLINE MEDIA
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DOI：
10.1093/poq/nfz042
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发表时间：
2019-09-01
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
Dinas, Elias
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Asker, David;Dinas, Elias
网络媒体是如何加剧意见两极分化的？“回音室”理论指出了选择性地接触同质观点和信息的作用。对这一观点持批评态度的人强调，网络媒体有可能扩大新闻消费者遇到的意识形态范围。这一讨论中隐含的假设是，网络媒体通过提供给用户的一系列信息来影响公众舆论。我们的研究表明，网络媒体可以通过提高内容的情感强度，甚至在暴露于意识形态异质观点的用户中诱导意见两极分化。更高的情感强度激发动机推理，这反过来又导致意见两极分化。评论区是一种用户驱动的交流工具，人们对其对意见形成的影响知之甚少。一项针对评论区的在线实验结果表明，被随机分配阅读一篇带有用户评论区的在线新闻文章的参与者，随后对该文章的主题表达了比没有任何评论阅读同一篇文章的对照组更极端的观点。与预期一致，这种效应是由评论的情感强度驱动的，这为动机推理是这种效应背后的机制提供了支持。
How do online media increase opinion polarization? The "echo chamber" thesis points to the role of selective exposure to homogeneous views and information. Critics of this view emphasize the potential of online media to expand the ideological spectrum that news consumers encounter. Embedded in this discussion is the assumption that online media affects public opinion via the range of information that it offers to users. We show that online media can induce opinion polarization even among users exposed to ideologically heterogeneous views, by heightening the emotional intensity of the content. Higher affective intensity provokes motivated reasoning, which in turn leads to opinion polarization. The results of an online experiment focusing on the comments section, a user-driven tool of communication whose effects on opinion formation remain poorly understood, show that participants randomly assigned to read an online news article with a user comments section subsequently express more extreme views on the topic of the article than a control group reading the same article without any comments. Consistent with expectations, this effect is driven by the emotional intensity of the comments, lending support to the idea that motivated reasoning is the mechanism behind this effect.