{"title":"Tuning Out (Political and Science) News? A Selective Exposure Study of the News Finds Me Perception","authors":"Chris Skurka, Mengqi Liao, Homero Gil de Zúñiga","doi":"10.1177/00936502231215528","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Individuals harboring perceptions that the “news will find me” (NFM) tend to be less active consuming traditional media, preferring news online and on social media. NFM has also been linked with lower political knowledge and political participation over time. What remains to be seen, however, is whether high-NFM individuals are in fact less likely to expose themselves to news once they do encounter it online. This preregistered study fills this gap in the literature by unobtrusively logging selection behaviors while U.S. adults browsed a mock news website featuring various hard and soft news stories. Consistent with our hypothesizing, NFM was associated with greater exposure to soft news. Additionally, we examined whether genre-specific NFM beliefs would predict less exposure to those news genres. We found support for this hypothesis in the context of science news, but for political news, this relationship depended on the news stories presented.","PeriodicalId":4,"journal":{"name":"ACS Applied Energy Materials","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.4000,"publicationDate":"2023-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"ACS Applied Energy Materials","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00936502231215528","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"材料科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"CHEMISTRY, PHYSICAL","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Individuals harboring perceptions that the “news will find me” (NFM) tend to be less active consuming traditional media, preferring news online and on social media. NFM has also been linked with lower political knowledge and political participation over time. What remains to be seen, however, is whether high-NFM individuals are in fact less likely to expose themselves to news once they do encounter it online. This preregistered study fills this gap in the literature by unobtrusively logging selection behaviors while U.S. adults browsed a mock news website featuring various hard and soft news stories. Consistent with our hypothesizing, NFM was associated with greater exposure to soft news. Additionally, we examined whether genre-specific NFM beliefs would predict less exposure to those news genres. We found support for this hypothesis in the context of science news, but for political news, this relationship depended on the news stories presented.
期刊介绍:
ACS Applied Energy Materials is an interdisciplinary journal publishing original research covering all aspects of materials, engineering, chemistry, physics and biology relevant to energy conversion and storage. The journal is devoted to reports of new and original experimental and theoretical research of an applied nature that integrate knowledge in the areas of materials, engineering, physics, bioscience, and chemistry into important energy applications.