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Communication Research
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Article

Looking the Other Way: Selective Exposure to Attitude-Consistent and Counterattitudinal Political Information

Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick* and Jingbo Meng

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: knobloch-westerwick.1{at}osu.edu.


  Abstract
An experiment with two computer-based sessions (complete data for 156 participants) examined selective exposure to attitude-consistent and counterattitudinal media messages. In the first session, participants indicated interest in politics and news, political attitudes, with four target issues embedded, along with attitude certainty and importance. Attitude accessibility data were derived from response latencies. In the second session, participants browsed an online opinion forum with eight texts about four issues, each with a pair of articles presenting opposing views. Selective exposure was unobtrusively recorded by software and coded as attitude-consistent and counterattitudinal based on individual participants’ attitudes. Results show that attitude-consistent exposure dominated regardless of particular issue, with 36% more reading time. Higher habitual news use and attitude certainty both fostered attitude-consistent exposure. Selection of counterattitudinal articles was more likely among participants with greater interest in politics, conservative party preference, stronger party preference, more accessible attitudes, and higher attitude importance.

First published on March 16, 2009, doi:10.1177/0093650209333030

Communication Research 2009;36:426.

A more recent version of this article appeared on June 1, 2009

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