Collaborative Research: Choice, Attention, and Reception: The Effects of Agency on Persuasion and Media Effects

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At the beginning of the 20th century, people worried that the expanding reach of mass media threatened to facilitate elite manipulation of the public. Their fears rested on the implicit view that media influence operated like administering a drug to a patient using a hypodermic needle: The influence of the message would be immediate and drastic. However, early research found little evidence to support this view, and instead found that people tend to avoid and resist messages in the mass media that conflict with their political predispositions. By mid-century many researchers concluded that the effects of mass media on public opinion were minimal at best. Subsequent research, however, found specific conditions under which the media indirectly influence public opinion. While contemporary experimental political communication research accepts the view that the effects of mass media depend on who receives the message, more often than not the research designs employ an operational "hypodermic needle" delivery of stimuli to participants. This has produced a gap in our knowledge of media effects. In particular, if exposure to political programming is positively correlated with the ability to resist influence from that programming, then the effects of the mass media on political attitudes may be more limited than extant experimental evidence suggests. This project investigates how selective exposure affects the influence of political programming found in the mass media, develops a theoretical framework to understand the process of selective exposure, and uses it to identify hypotheses. These hypotheses are tested using experiments that allow some participants in a controlled laboratory setting to change television channels while their behavior is monitored. The project hypothesizes that current research overstates the extent to which the news media influence citizens' levels of trust in government and politicians, evaluations of political figures, and attitude polarization. In addition to testing the real-world applicability of political communications scholars' contemporary explanations of media influence, the project has broader impacts for society concerning the role that political television programming plays in an increasingly fragmented media environment in which citizens can easily avoid television shows with overt political content. The study offers guidance on the following questions: Are uncivil political debate shows really "hurting" America? Does the television news affect what issues the public think is important when they are evaluating politicians? Is the fragmentation of political programming and expanded choice over news sources on cable television leading to a more divided and more extreme polity? The project also provides training to graduate students in social science methodologies and exposes undergraduate students to processes of social scientific inquiry.