Liberals and conservatives are similarly motivated to avoid exposure to one another's opinions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2017.04.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Liberals and conservatives are similarly motivated to avoid crosscutting information.

  • Approximately two thirds of people gave up a chance to win extra money in order to avoid hearing from the other side.

  • The aversion applied to issues such as same-sex marriage, elections, marijuana, climate change, guns, and abortion.

  • The aversion is not a product of already being or feeling knowledgeable.

  • People anticipated that crosscutting information would produce cognitive dissonance and harm relationships.

Abstract

Ideologically committed people are similarly motivated to avoid ideologically crosscutting information. Although some previous research has found that political conservatives may be more prone to selective exposure than liberals are, we find similar selective exposure motives on the political left and right across a variety of issues. The majority of people on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate willingly gave up a chance to win money to avoid hearing from the other side (Study 1). When thinking back to the 2012 U.S. Presidential election (Study 2), ahead to upcoming elections in the U.S. and Canada (Study 3), and about a range of other Culture War issues (Study 4), liberals and conservatives reported similar aversion toward learning about the views of their ideological opponents. Their lack of interest was not due to already being informed about the other side or attributable election fatigue. Rather, people on both sides indicated that they anticipated that hearing from the other side would induce cognitive dissonance (e.g., require effort, cause frustration) and undermine a sense of shared reality with the person expressing disparate views (e.g., damage the relationship; Study 5). A high-powered meta-analysis of our data sets (N = 2417) did not detect a difference in the intensity of liberals' (d = 0.63) and conservatives' (d = 0.58) desires to remain in their respective ideological bubbles.

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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