Resisting political fragmentation on the internet

Daedalus

Volumn 140, Issue 4, 2011, Pages 108-120

  Garrett, R Kelly ^a   Resnick, Paul ^b  

^a OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 80053272375     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/DAED_a_00118     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IIS-0916099.
2. Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, "Ideological Segregation Online and Offline," Quarterly Journal of Economics (forthcoming).
3. Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001)
4. Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You (New York: Penguin Press, 2011).
5. Glenn S. Sanders and Brian Mullen, "Accuracy in Perceptions of Consensus: Differential Tendencies of People with Majority and Minority Positions," European Journal of Social Psychology 13 (1983)
6. Lee Ross, David Greene, and Pamela House, "The 'False Consensus Effect': An Egocentric Bias in Social Perception and Attribution Processes," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 13 (1977).
7. Cass R. Sunstein, Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 199.
8. Eugene Burnstein and Amiram Vinokur, "Persuasive Argumentation and Social Comparison as Determinants of Attitude Polarization," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 13 (1977).
9. Miles Efron, "The Liberal Media and Right-Wing Conspiracies: Using Cocitation Information to Estimate Political Orientation in Web Documents," paper presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Thirteenth Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Washington, D.C., November 2004
10. Michael Gamon et al., "Blews: Using Blogs to Provide Context for News Articles," paper presented at the Second Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Seattle, Washington, April 2008.
11. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, The People's Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944), 164.
12. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957).
13. David O. Sears and Jonathan L. Freedman, "Selective Exposure to Information: A Critical Review," Public Opinion Quarterly 31 (1967).
14. Dieter Frey, "Recent Research on Selective Exposure to Information," Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 19 (1986).
15. Steven H. Chaffee, Melissa N. Saphir, Joseph Graf, Christian Sandvig, and Kyu S. Hahn, "Attention to Counter-Attitudinal Messages in a State Election Campaign," Political Communication 18 (2001).
16. Diana C. Mutz and Paul S. Martin, "Facilitating Communication across Lines of Political Difference: The Role of Mass Media," American Political Science Review 95 (2001).
17. Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance, "The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog," paper presented at the Second Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics, Chiba, Japan, 2005.
18. Natalie Jomini Stroud, "Media Use and Political Predispositions: Revisiting the Concept of Selective Exposure," Political Behavior 30 (2008).
19. Charles S. Taber and Milton Lodge, "Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs," American Journal of Political Science 50 (2006)
20. Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick and Jingbo Meng, "Looking the Other Way: Selective Exposure to Attitude-Consistent and Counterattitudinal Political Information," Communication Research 36 (2009).
21. W. Lance Bennett and Shanto Iyengar, "A New Era of Minimal Effects? The Changing Foundations of Political Communication," Journal of Communication 58 (2008).
22. Eszter Hargittai, Jason Gallo, and Matthew Kane, "Cross-Ideological Discussions among Conservative and Liberal Bloggers," Public Choice 134 (2008).
23. R. Kelly Garrett, "Politically Motivated Reinforcement Seeking: Reframing the Selective Exposure Debate," Journal of Communication 59 (2009).
24. R. Kelly Garrett, "Echo Chambers Online?: Politically Motivated Selective Exposure among Internet News Users," Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14 (2009).
25. Sean A. Munson and Paul Resnick, paper presented at chi 2010: Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Atlanta, Georgia, April 10-15, 2010.
26. The data are unpublished. For survey details,
27. R. Kelly Garrett, "Troubling Consequences of Online Election Rumoring," Human Communication Research 37 (2011).
28. Knobloch-Westerwick and Meng, "Looking the Other Way."
29. Dieter Frey, "Recent Research on Selective Exposure to Information"; Dolores Albarracín and Amy Mitchell, "The Role of Defensive Confidence in Preference for Proattitudinal Information: How Believing That One Is Strong Can Sometimes Be a Defensive Weakness," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30 (2004).
30. Natalie J. Shook and Russell H. Fazio, "Political Ideology, Exploration of Novel Stimuli, and Attitude Formation," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (2009).
31. David M. Amodio, John T. Jost, Sarah L. Master, and Cindy M. Yee, "Neurocognitive Correlates of Liberalism and Conservatism," Nature Neuroscience 10 (2007).
32. John T. Jost, Jack Glaser, Arie W. Kruglanski, and Frank J. Sulloway, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," Psychological Bulletin 129 (2003).
33. Nicholas A. Valentino, Antoine J. Banks, Vincent L. Hutchings, and Anne K. Davis, "Selective Exposure in the Internet Age: The Interaction between Anxiety and Information Utility," Political Psychology 30 (2009).
34. Howard Lavine, Milton Lodge, and Kate Freitas, "Threat, Authoritarianism, and Selective Exposure to Information," Political Psychology 26 (2005).
35. Peter Fischer, Eva Jonas, Dieter Frey, and Stefan Schulz-Hardt, "Selective Exposure to Information: The Impact of Information Limits," European Journal of Social Psychology 35 (2005).
36. The prospect of a partisan press is not altogether new. To the contrary, sociologist Michael Schudson notes that the norm of journalistic objectivity is a relatively recent invention, dating back to the early twentieth century. The intervening years may be the exception, making a return to more propagandistic journalism likely.
37. Michael Schudson, "The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism," Journalism 2 (2001).
38. These strategies are focused on media exposure and do not address fragmentation due to homophilous interpersonal networks. Although there may be analogous ways of addressing homophily, they will not be identical because the underlying motivations are distinct. Most notably, many people do have a strong aversion to interpersonal disagreement.
39. Souneil Park, Seungwoo Kang, Sangyoung Chung, and Junehwa Song, Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Boston, Massachusetts, 2009.
40. Michael X. Delli Carpini, Fay Lomax Cook, and Lawrence R. Jacobs, "Public Deliberation, Discursive Participation, and Citizen Engagement: A Review of the Empirical Literature," Annual Review of Political Science 7 (2004).
41. Andrew Kohut, Carroll Doherty, Michael Dimock, and Scott Keeter, Ideological News Sources: Who Watches and Why (Washington, D.C.: The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 2010).
42. Miriam J. Metzger, Andrew J. Flanagin, and Ryan B. Medders, "Social and Heuristic Approaches to Credibility Evaluation Online," Journal of Communication 60 (2010).
43. Items are automatically classified based on the political leanings of the people who voted to promote the article to the website's front page.
44. Howard Lavine et al., "Threat, Authoritarianism, and Voting: An Investigation of Personality and Persuasion," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 25 (1999).