Showing 1 - 3 of 3 Items
“Unmotivated bias” and partisan hostility: Empirical evidence
Date: 2019-04-01
Creator: Daniel F. Stone
Access: Open access
- Extreme partisan animosity has been on the rise in the US and is prevalent around the world. This hostility is typically attributed to social group identity, motivated reasoning, or a combination thereof. In this paper, I empirically examine a novel contributing factor: the “unmotivated” cognitive bias of overprecision (overconfidence in precision of beliefs). Overprecision could cause partisan hostility indirectly via inflated confidence in one's own ideology, partisan identity, or perceptions of social distance between the parties. Overprecision could also cause this hostility directly by causing excessively strong inferences from observed information that is either skewed against the out-party or simply misunderstood. Using a nationally representative sample, I find consistent support for direct effects of overprecision and mixed support for indirect effects. The point estimates imply a one standard deviation increase in a respondent's overprecision predicts as much as a 0.71 standard deviation decline in relative out-party favorability.
Partisan selective engagement: Evidence from Facebook
Date: 2020-09-01
Creator: Marcel Garz, Jil Sörensen, Daniel F. Stone
Access: Open access
- This study investigates the effects of variation in “congeniality” of news on Facebook user engagement (likes, shares, and comments). We compile an original data set of Facebook posts by 84 German news outlets on politicians that were investigated for criminal offenses from January 2012 to June 2017. We also construct an index of each outlet's media slant by comparing the language of the outlet with that of the main political parties, which allows us to measure the congeniality of the posts. We find that user engagement with congenial posts is higher than with uncongenial ones, especially in terms of likes. The within-outlet, within-topic design allows us to infer that the greater engagement with congenial news is likely driven by psychological and social factors, rather than a desire for accurate or otherwise instrumental information.
The supply of media slant across outlets and demand for slant within outlets: Evidence from US presidential campaign news
Date: 2020-06-01
Creator: Marcel Garz, Gaurav Sood, Daniel F. Stone, Justin Wallace
Access: Open access
- We conduct across-outlet and within-outlet (and within-topic) analyses of “congenially” slanted news. We study “horse race” news (news on candidates' chances in an upcoming election) from six major online outlets for the 2012 and 2016 US presidential campaigns. We find robust evidence that horse race headlines were slanted congenially with respect to the preferences of the outlets' typical readers. However, evidence of congenial slant in the timing and frequency of horse race stories is weaker. We also find limited evidence of greater within-outlet demand for headlines most congenial to outlets' typical readers, and somewhat stronger evidence of greater demand for relatively uncongenial headlines. We discuss how various aspects of our results are consistent with each of the major mechanisms driving slant studied in the theoretical literature, and may help explain when each mechanism is more likely to come into play. In particular, readers may be more likely to click on uncongenial headlines due to inferring that these stories are particularly informative when they stand in contrast to an outlet's typically congenial slant.