Abstract
The people we associate with everyday have an important influence on our exposure and reactions to political stimuli. Social network members in particular can have a dramatic impact on our political views and behavior. Prior research suggests that these attitudinal differences may reflect the information available in a social network: attitudinally congruent networks expose individuals to supporting positions, bolstering their views, while heterogeneous networks provide information on both sides of an issue, generating doubt and ambivalence. In contrast, the current studies examine the effects of individuals’ networks in motivating them to find and engage with new political information on their own. Using ANES panel data, a laboratory-based information board session that examines behavior in detail, and an experimental design that manipulates network composition, we find that individuals in attitudinally heterogeneous social networks are more likely to seek out and attend to political information. They spend more time looking for political information, and then (having found it) spend more time reviewing that new information compared to those whose network members are more like-minded. An experimental study further demonstrates that network composition causally determines these information-seeking preferences. Implications for democratic citizenship in light of these findings are discussed.
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Notes
Absolute values were used because only a network that completely agrees with an individual (not disagrees equally in both directions) should suppress openness to other views and bolster self-confidence, whereas disagreeing in either (or both) directions should increase awareness of differing positions and increase doubt of one’s own.
The current analyses are an aspect of a larger, more complex study. Here we include only participants in the experimental condition relevant to our current purpose, specifically those who saw the information board in question (following a warm-up board), rather than participants in conditions with minimal control over information exposure.
There were initially 60 participants, but we dropped one outlier who did not select any information over the course of 4 minutes in the session, four participants who rated their English comprehension as only moderate or less, and four participants who failed to provide any information on their party identification.
For more information about the DPTE software, please visit http://dpte.polisci.uiowa.edu/dpte/.
Due to some limitations in the DPTE computer program, the social network questionnaire was administered via pencil and paper. The separation of this questionnaire from the rest of the computer-based study also masked the purpose of these items as a vital independent variable in the study.
We examined alternate causal routes by running analyses on study 2 data that control for network heterogeneity on a separate issue, processing speed, need for closure, political interest, and social desirability, and found the results substantively unaltered (see Appendix B for full models and explanation).
These data were originally part of a larger experiment designed to examine the consequences of exposure to various types of social information.
For discussion by NPR, see http://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132934543/depression-on-the-rise-in-college-students.
E.g. at the University of Chicago: http://chicagomaroon.com/2002/04/09/news-in-brief-28/.
E.g. at Harvard: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/2/22/mental-health-yard-rally/.
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Acknowledgments
Previous versions of this paper were presented at meetings of the Midwestern Political Science Association and the International Society for Political Psychology. The authors would like to thank the editors, anonymous reviewers, and discussants for their helpful comments. We would also like to thank Karyn Amira, Mark Lombardi, and April Johnson for their invaluable assistance.
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Levitan, L., Wronski, J. Social Context and Information Seeking: Examining the Effects of Network Attitudinal Composition on Engagement with Political Information. Polit Behav 36, 793–816 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-013-9247-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-013-9247-z