Looking for relief: Developing and testing the emotion-regulation explanation of selective exposure to political information

TY - JOUR

T1 - Looking for relief

T2 - Developing and testing the emotion-regulation explanation of selective exposure to political information

AU - Kiil, Filip

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Author. Political Psychology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Society of Political Psychology.

PY - 2024/4

Y1 - 2024/4

N2 - Though selective exposure is immensely important for the functioning of democracy, no consensus exists as to its cause. The most frequently assumed causal explanation is cognitive dissonance avoidance, but direct empirical tests of this explanation are incredibly rare and have generally not been supportive. Furthermore, although cognitive dissonance avoidance concerns regulation of emotional states, this explanation has not yet been integrated with the newest research on emotion-regulation processes and their role in shaping political attitudes and behavior. I perform such a theoretical integration and derive testable implications of the emotion-regulation account of the role of cognitive dissonance in shaping selective exposure. I test these together with expectations derived from an alternative explanation (informational utility), in two, original, preregistered survey experiments with 4864 U.S. adults combined. I consistently find support for the emotion-regulation account in experimental tests and in two out of three observational analyses. The alternative explanation of informational utility finds support in observational analyses, but not in the experimental tests. The study provides the first experimental evidence linking emotion regulation and selective exposure and suggests that people do, indeed, select like-minded sources to downregulate negative emotion.

AB - Though selective exposure is immensely important for the functioning of democracy, no consensus exists as to its cause. The most frequently assumed causal explanation is cognitive dissonance avoidance, but direct empirical tests of this explanation are incredibly rare and have generally not been supportive. Furthermore, although cognitive dissonance avoidance concerns regulation of emotional states, this explanation has not yet been integrated with the newest research on emotion-regulation processes and their role in shaping political attitudes and behavior. I perform such a theoretical integration and derive testable implications of the emotion-regulation account of the role of cognitive dissonance in shaping selective exposure. I test these together with expectations derived from an alternative explanation (informational utility), in two, original, preregistered survey experiments with 4864 U.S. adults combined. I consistently find support for the emotion-regulation account in experimental tests and in two out of three observational analyses. The alternative explanation of informational utility finds support in observational analyses, but not in the experimental tests. The study provides the first experimental evidence linking emotion regulation and selective exposure and suggests that people do, indeed, select like-minded sources to downregulate negative emotion.

KW - audience segmentation

KW - cognitive dissonance

KW - credibility

KW - emotion regulation

KW - informational utility

KW - preregistration

KW - selective exposure

U2 - 10.1111/pops.12929

DO - 10.1111/pops.12929

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:85171458336

SN - 0162-895X

VL - 45

SP - 279

EP - 297

JO - Political Psychology

JF - Political Psychology

IS - 2

ER -