Liberals and conservatives are similarly motivated to avoid exposure to one another's opinions
Section snippets
Selective exposure
People tend to selectively expose themselves to belief-confirming information for at least two reasons. First, information that conflicts with one's own beliefs creates cognitive dissonance and feelings of personal discomfort (Festinger, 1957). This personal discomfort thesis aligns with the well-supported notion that selective exposure is a form of self-defense against feeling threatened (Webb et al., 2013, Hart et al., 2009). Selective exposure may also have interpersonal origins. According
The current research
We tested whether liberals and conservatives are similarly or differentially motivated avoid crosscutting information, and whether the same or different underlying psychological processes are at play for both groups. In Study 1, we asked people on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate to either read belief-confirming statements for a chance to win some money or belief-disconfirming statements for a chance to win even more money. The economically maximizing choice is to read uncongenial
Study 1
We tested whether liberals or conservatives are more likely to give up a chance to earn $3 to get out of having to hear from the other side on the topic of legalizing same-sex marriage.
Study 2
The goal of Study 2 was to test whether liberals or conservatives are more motivated to avoid crosscutting information using a new method and new issue. We asked people who voted for Obama or Romney in the 2012 U.S. Presidential election how interested they were in learning about why people voted the way they did in 2012.
Study 3
Study 3 tested whether people report an aversion to crosscutting information when thinking about a future national election. We included both upcoming U.S. and Canadian national elections to test whether this aversion to crosscutting information exists in a context that is somewhat less polarized than the U.S. (namely, Canada). At the time of data collection in the U.S., the 2016 Presidential primary campaigning was just about to begin, and Donald Trump (the eventual victor) had not yet
Study 4
In Study 4a, we tested whether belief confirmation motives are at play and (a)symmetric in a variety of other contentious issues in the US. The aim of Study 4 was to test whether the effects concerning SSM (Study 1) and voting preference (Studies 2 and 3) generalize to other Culture War issues.
Study 5
Why are people on the left and right motivated to avoid disconfirming information? We suggest that two processes may be at play. First, exposure to belief-disconfirming information could create cognitive dissonance and resulting negative affect. And second, hearing belief-challenging information could undermine a sense of shared reality with close others, thus threatening a fundamental need. Using a mediation approach, we tested whether both sides anticipate that listening to
Summary analysis
We summarily tested whether liberals and conservatives are similarly prone to prefer belief-confirming over belief-disconfirming information by meta-analyzing the data from all five studies (See Table S10 in the Supplemental materials for the data included). We converted group difference statistics (χ2 or d, depending on the study) to equivalent correlation coefficients, req. Then, using a Hedges and Vevea (1998) random effects model, we found that liberals (N = 1612; d = 0.62; req. = 0.30; z = 11.36, p
General discussion
Five studies found that liberals and conservatives were similarly motivated to avoid hearing one another's opinions on a variety of social issues, and largely for the same reasons. In Study 1, most people on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate willingly passed up on a chance to win an extra $3 to avoid having to hear from the other side. And Studies 2–4 found that people on both sides of recent and upcoming national elections in the US and Canada, as well as both sides of an array of
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to J. A. Frimer [grant number 435-2013-0589].
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