Social media mixed with news in political candidate judgment: Order effects on knowledge and affect
Abstract
In the context of politics, emotions and facts work together to shape opinions about political candidates. While there is considerable research on motivated reasoning about political issues, there is less attention to how affect and rationality combine in the hybrid world of new media. This study examined the interaction of social media comments about politicians with more traditional information sources. Participants were exposed to political candidates' Facebook news feeds, to news articles about the candidates, and to a political speech. The order of exposure was varied and measures of both knowledge and emotion were taken. When social media was encountered before news about a political candidate, it influenced feelings toward the candidate but did not influence personal mood or perceived knowledge. In contrast, when social media was encountered before information unrelated to the candidates, it negatively influenced all dependent measures. The findings are discussed in terms of motivated reasoning theories, Papacharissi's concept of ``affective publics,'' and the implications for civic participation in the new media era.
References
[1] | Bennett W.L., and Manheim J.B., The one-step flow of communication, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 608: (1) ((2006) ), 213-232. |
[2] | Berger J.A., and Milkman K.L., What makes online content viral? Journal of Marketing Research 49: (2) ((2012) ), 192-205. |
[3] | Bimber B., and Davis R., Campaigning online: The Internet in U.S. elections, Oxford University Press: Oxford, (2003) . |
[4] | Bollen J., , Mao H., and Pepe A., Modeling public mood and emotion: Twitter sentiment and socio-economic phenomena. In Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, (2011) , pp. 450-453. |
[5] | Bollen J., , Mao H., and Zeng X.-J., Twitter mood predicts the stock market, Journal of Computational Science 2: (1) ((2011) ), 1-8. doi: 10.1016/j.jocs.2010.12.007. |
[6] | Chadwick A., The political information cycle in a hybrid news system: The British prime minister and the ``Bullygate'' affair, The International Journal of Press/Politics 16: (1) ((2011) ), 3-29. |
[7] | Chadwick A., Web 2.0: New challenges for the study of e-democracy in an era of informational exuberance, I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society 5: (1) ((2009) ), 9-41. |
[8] | Chaffee S.H., Mass media and interpersonal channels: Competitive, convergent, or complementary? In Inter/media: Interpersonal communication in a media world, G. Gumpert and R. Cathart, eds., Oxford University Press: New York, (1986) . pp. 57-77. |
[9] | Choi S., The two-step flow of communication in Twitter-based public forums, Social Science Computer Review 33: (6) ((2015) ), 696-711. doi: 10.1177/0894439314556599. |
[10] | Dahlberg L., Computer-mediated communication and the public sphere: A critical analysis, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 7: (1) ((2001) ). doi: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2001.tb00137.x. |
[11] | Dahlgren P., The Internet, public spheres, and political communication: Dispersion and deliberation, Political Communication 22: (2) ((2005) ), 147-162. |
[12] | Dholakia U.M., , Bagozzi R.P., and Pearo L.K., A social influence model of consumer participation in network- and small-group-based virtual communities, International Journal of Research in Marketing 21: (3) ((2004) ), 241-263. |
[13] | Donath J., and boyd D., Public displays of connection, BT Technology Journal 22: (4) ((2004) ), 71-82. |
[14] | Duggan M., , Ellison N.B., , Lampe C., , Lenhart A., and Madden M., Social media update 2014, Pew Research Center, January (2015) . Available at: http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/01/09/social-media-update-2014/. |
[15] | Ellison N.B., , Steinfield C., and Lampe C., The benefits of Facebook ``friends'': Social capital and college students' use of online social network sites, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12: (4) ((2007) ), 1143-1168 doi: 10.1111/ j.1083-6101.2007.00367.x. |
[16] | Fraser N., Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. In Habermas and the Public Sphere, C. Calhoun, ed., MIT Press: Cambridge MA, (1992) , pp. 109-142. |
[17] | Gibson K., and O'Donnell S., User-generated video and the online public sphere: Will YouTube facilitate digital freedom of expression in Atlantic Canada? American Communication Journal 10: (3) ((2008) ). Available at: http://ac-journal.org/ journal/pubs/2008/Fall%2008%20-%20Defining%20Digital%20Freedom/Article_5.pdf, Accessed on March 26, 2014. |
[18] | Gilbert E., , Bergstrom T., and Karahalios K., Blogs are echo chambers: Blogs are echo chambers, Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, (HICSS '09) ((2009) ). doi: 10.1109/HICSS.2009.91. |
[19] | Gil de Zúñiga H., , Jung N., , Valenzuela S., Social media use for news and individuals' social capital, civic engagement and political participation, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 17: ((2012) ), 319-336. |
[20] | Glaser J., and Salovey P., Affect in electoral politics, Personality and Social Psychology Review 2: (3) ((1998) ), 156-172. |
[21] | Habermas J., The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society, MIT Press: Cambridge MA, (1989) . |
[22] | Hampton K.N., , Goulet L.S., , Raine L., and Purcell K., Social networking sites and our lives. Pew Internet and American Life Project, June 16, (2011) . http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Technology-and-social-networks.aspx, Accessed on June. 14, 2012. |
[23] | Hampton K., and Wellman B., Neighboring in Netville: How the Internet supports community and social capital in a wired suburb, City & Community 2: (4) ((2003) ), 277-311. |
[24] | Hastie R., A primer of information-processing theory for the political scientist. In Political Cognition: The 19th Annual Carnegie Symposium on Cognition, R.R. Lau and D.O. Sears, eds., Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, (1986) , pp. 11-39. |
[25] | Hilbert M., , Vasquez J., , Halpern D., , Valenzuela S., and Arriagada E., One step, two step, network step? Complementary perspectives on communication flows in Twittered citizen protests, Social Science Computer Review, April 12, ((2016) ). doi: 10.1177/0894439316639561. |
[26] | Hoang T.A., , Cohen W.W., , Lim E.P., , Pierce D., and Redlawsk D., Politics, sharing and emotion in microblogs. In Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ACM Press, pp. 282-289. |
[27] | Holcomb J., , Gottfried J., and Mitchell A., News use across social media platforms. Pew Research Center, November, (2013) . Available at http://www.journalism.org/2013/11/14/news-use-across-social-media-platforms/, Accessed on March 7, 2014. |
[28] | Horrigan J., , Garrett K., and Resnick P., The Internet and democratic debate. Pew Research Center, October, (2004) . Available at http://www.pewinternet.org/2004/10/27/the-internet-and-democratic-debate/, Accessed on March 7, 2014. |
[29] | Howard P.N., and Chadwick A., Conclusion: Political omnivores and wired states. In The handbook of internet politics, A. Chadwick and P.N. Howard, eds., Routledge: London, (2009) , pp. 424-434. |
[30] | Jones B.D., Bounded rationality, Annual Review of Political Science 2: ((1999) ), 297-321. |
[31] | Katz E., and Lazarsfeld P.F., Personal influence: The part played by people in the flow of mass communications, The Free Press: New York, (1955) . |
[32] | Kavanaugh A., , Carroll J.M., , Rosson M.B., , Zin T.T., and Reese D.D., Community networks: Where offline communities meet online, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10: (4) ((2005) ). doi: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2005.tb00266.x. |
[33] | Klinger U., and Svensson J., The emergence of network media logic in political communication: A theoretical approach, New Media and Society 17: ((2015) ), 1241-1257. doi: 10.1177/1461444814522952. |
[34] | Kunda Z., Motivated inference: Self-serving generation and evaluation of causal theories, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53: (4) ((1987) ), 636-647. |
[35] | Lampe C., , Ellison N., and Steinfield C., A face (book) in the crowd: Social searching vs. social browsing. In Proceedings of the 20th Anniversary Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, ACM: New York, (2006) , 167-170. |
[36] | Lampe C., , Wash R., , Valesquez A., and Ozkaya E., Motivations to participate in online communities. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'10), ACM: New York, (2010) , pp. 1927-1936. |
[37] | Lau R., Models of decision making. In D. Sears, L. Huddy and R. Jervis, Oxford handbook of political psychology, Oxford University Press: Oxford, (2003) . |
[38] | Lee C.S., and Ma L., News sharing in social media: The effect of gratifications and prior experience, Computers in Human Behavior 28: (2) ((2012) ), 331-339. |
[39] | Loader B., and Mercea D., Networking democracy? Social media innovations and participatory politics, Information, Communication & Society 14: (6) ((2011) ), 757-769. |
[40] | Lodge M., , McGraw K., and Stroh P., An impression-driven model of candidate evaluation, American Political Science Review 83: (June) ((1989) ), 399-419. |
[41] | Lodge M., , Steenbergen M., and Brau S., The responsive voter: Campaign information and the dynamics of candidate evaluation, American Political Science Review 89: (June) ((1995) ), 309-326. |
[42] | Lodge M., and Taber C., Three steps toward a theory of motivated political reasoning. In Elements of reason: Cognition, choice, and the bounds of rationality, A. Lupia, M.D. McCubbins and S.L. Popkin, eds., Cambridge University Press: London, (2000) , pp. 183-213. |
[43] | Marcus G.E., Emotions in politics, Annual Review of Political Science 3: ((2000) ), 221-250. |
[44] | Marcus G.E., , Neuman W.R., and MacKuen M., Affective intelligence and political judgment, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, (2000) . |
[45] | Maruyama M., , Robertson S.P., , Douglas S., and Semaan B., Hybrid media consumption: How tweeting during a televised political debate influences the vote decision. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, ACM: New York, (2014) , pp. 1422-1432. |
[46] | Messner M., and Distaso M.W., The source cycle: How traditional media and weblogs use each other as sources, Journalism Studies 9: (3) ((2008) ), 447-463. |
[47] | Mitchell A., , Kiley J., , Gottfried J., and Guskin E., The role of news on Facebook: Common yet incidental. Pew Research, (2013) . Available at http://www.journalism.org/2013/10/24/the-role-of-news-on-facebook/, Accessed on March 7, 2014. |
[48] | McComb M., and Ghanem S.I., The convergence of agenda setting and framing. In S.D. Reese, O.H.J. Gandy, and A.E. Grant, eds., Framing public life: Perspectives on media and our understanding of the social world, Erlbaum: Mahwah, NJ, (2003) , pp. 67-82. |
[49] | Mehrabian A., Pleasure-arousal-dominance: A general framework for describing and measuring individual differenced in temperament, Current Psychology 14(4) ((1996) ), 261-292. |
[50] | Milliken M., and O'Donnell S., User-generated online video: The next public sphere? IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society, (2008) , pp. 1-3. |
[51] | Norris P., and Curtice J., Getting the message out: A two-step model of the role of the Internet in campaign communication flows during the 2005 British general election, Journal of Information Technology & Politics 4: (4) ((2008) ), 3-13. doi: 10.1080/19331680801975359. |
[52] | Papacharissi Z., Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics, Oxford University Press, (2015) . |
[53] | Papacharissi Z., A private sphere: Democracy in a digital age, Polity Press: Cambridge, (2010) . |
[54] | Papacharissi Z., The virtual sphere: The Internet as a public sphere, New Media and Society 4: (1) ((2002) ), 9-27. |
[55] | Papacharissi Z., and de Fatima Olivera M., Affective news and networked publics: The rhythms of news storytelling on #Egypt, Journal of Communication 62: (2) ((2012) ), 266-282. |
[56] | Park N., , Kee K.F., and Valenzuela S., Is there social capital in a social network site?: Facebook use and college students' life satisfaction, trust, and participation, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14: (4) ((2009) ), 875-901. |
[57] | Poor N., Mechanisms of an online public sphere: The website Slashdot, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10: (2) ((2005) ). doi: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2005.tb00241.x. |
[58] | Rahn W.M., Affect as information: The role of public mood in political reasoning. In Elements of reason: Cognition, choice, and the bounds of rationality, A. Lupia, M.D. McCubbins, and S.L. Popkin, eds., Cambridge University Press: London, (2000) , pp. 130-151. |
[59] | Raine L., and Smith A., Politics on social networking sites, Pew Internet and American Life Project, Sept. 4, (2012) . http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Politics-on-SNS.aspx. |
[60] | Redlawsk D.P., Hot cognition or cool consideration? Testing the effects of motivated reasoning on political decision making, The Journal of Politics 64: (4) ((2002) ), 1021-1044. |
[61] | Redlawsk D.P., Motivated reasoning, affect, and the role of memory in voter decision-making. In Feeling politics: Emotion in political information processing, D.P Redlawsk, ed., Palgrave Macmillan: New York, (2006) , pp. 87-107. |
[62] | Redlawsk D.P., You must remember this: A test of the on-line model of voting, The Journal of Politics 63: (1) ((2001) ), 29-58. |
[63] | Resnick P., Beyond bowling together: Sociotechnical capital. In J. Carroll, ed., HCI in the new millennium, Addison-Wesley: Boston, MA, (2001) , pp. 247-272. |
[64] | Riker W.H., and Ordeshook P.C., A theory of the calculus of voting, American Political Science Review 62: (March) ((1968) ), 25-42. |
[65] | Robertson S.P., Changes in referents and emotions over time in election-related social networking dialog. In Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, IEEE Computer Society: Washington DC, (2011) , pp. 9. |
[66] | Robertson S.P., , Douglas S., , Maruyama M., and Chen L., Political dialog evolution in a social network. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, ACM: New York, (2012) , pp. 40-48. |
[67] | Robertson S.P., , Semaan B., , Douglas S., and Maruyama M., Mixed media: Interactions of social and traditional media in political decision making. In Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, IEEE Computer Society: Washington, DC, (2013) , pp. 2013-2022. |
[68] | Robertson S.P., , Vatrapu R.K., and Medina R., The social life of social networks: Facebook linkage patterns in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. In Proceedings of the 10th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, Digital Government Society of North America, (2009) , pp. 6-15. |
[69] | Robertson S.P., , Vatrapu R.K., and Medina R., Off-the-wall political discourse: Facebook use in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Information Polity 15: (1-2) ((2010) ), 11-31. |
[70] | Robertson S.P., , Vatrapu R.K., and Medina R., Online video ``friends'' social networking: Overlapping online public spheres in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Journal of Information Technology and Politics 7: (2-3) ((2010) ), 182-201. |
[71] | Scheafer T., How to evaluate it: The role of story-evaluative tone in agenda setting and priming, Journal of Communication 57: (1) ((2006) ), 21-39. |
[72] | Scheufele D.A., and Tewksbury D., Framing, agenda setting, and priming: The evolution of three media effects models, Journal of Communication 57: (1) ((2007) ), 9-20. |
[73] | Schoenbach K., and Semeetko H., Agenda-setting, agenda-reinforcing, or agenda-deflating: A study of the 1990 German national election, Journalism Quarterly 69: ((1992) ), 837-846. |
[74] | Semaan B., , Robertson S.P., , Douglas S., and Maruyama M., Social media supporting political deliberation across multiple public spheres: Towards depolarization. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, ACM: New York, NY, (2014) , pp. 1409-1421. |
[75] | Simon H.A., Information processing models of cognition, Annual Review of Psychology 30: ((1979) ), 363-396. |
[76] | Simon H.A., Human nature in politics: The dialogue of psychology with political science, American Political Science Review 79: (June) ((1985) ), 293-304. |
[77] | Simon H.A., Rationality in political behavior, Political Psychology 16: (March) ((1995) ), 45-61. |
[78] | Stieglitz S., and Dang-Xuan L., Emotions and information diffusion in social media - sentiment of microblogs and sharing behavior, Journal of Management Information Systems 29: (4) ((2013) ), 217-248. |
[79] | Stromer-Galley J., Diversity of political conversation on the Internet: Users' perspectives, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 8: (3) ((2003) ). doi: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2003.tb00215.x. |
[80] | Stroud N.J., Media effects, selective exposure, and Fahrenheit 9/11, Political Communication 24: (4) ((2007) ), 415-432. |
[81] | Stroud N.J., Media use and political predispositions: Revisiting the concept of selective exposure, Political Behavior 30: ((2008) ), 341-366. |
[82] | Thompson J.B., The media and modernity: A social theory of the media, Polity Press: Cambridge, (1995) . |
[83] | Tremayne M., Blogging, citizenship, and the future of media, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group: New York, (2006) . |
[84] | Tumasjan A., , Sprenger T.O., , Sandner P.G., , Welpe I.M., Predicting elections with Twitter: What 140 characters reveal about political sentiment. In Proceedings of the Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, (2010) , pp. 178-185. |
[85] | Vaccari C., , Chadwick A., and O'Loughlin B., Dual screening the political: Media events, social media, and citizen engagement, Journal of Communication 65: (6) ((2015) ), 1041-1061. |
[86] | Vatrapu R., , Robertson S.P., and Dissanayake W., Are political weblogs public spheres or partisan spheres? International Reports on Socio-Informatics 5: (1) ((2008) ), 7-26. |
[87] | Wallsten K., Many sources, one message: Political blog links to online videos during the 2008 campaign, Journal of Political Marketing 10: (1-2) ((2011) ), 88-114. |
[88] | Walther J.B., , Carr C.T., , S.S.W Choi, , DeAndrea D.C., , Kim J., , Tong S.T., , Van Der Heide B., Interaction of interpersonal, peer, and media influence sources online. In A networked self: Identity, community, and culture on social network sites, Z. Papacharissi, ed., Routledge: New York, (2011) , pp. 17-38. |
[89] | Weeks B.E., , Ardèvol-Abreu A., and Gil de Zúñiga H., Online influence? Social media use, opinion leadership, and political persuasion, International Journal of Opinion Research ((2015) ). doi: 10.1093/ijpor/edv050. |
[90] | Weisberg H.F., and Rusk J.G., Dimensions of candidate evaluation, American Political Science Review 64: ((1970) ), 1167-1185. |
[91] | Wellman B., , Haase A.Q., , Witte J., and Hampton K., Does the Internet increase, decrease, or supplement social capital? Social networks, participation, and community commitment, American Behavioral Scientist 45: (3) ((2001) ), 436-455. |
[92] | Wicks R.H., , Bradley A., , Blackburn G., and Fields T., Tracking the blogs: An evaluation of attacks, acclaims, and rebuttals presented on political blogs during the 2008 presidential election, American Behavioral Scientist 55: ((2011) ), 651-666. |
[93] | Williams B., and Gulati G., The political impact of Facebook: Evidence from the 2006 midterm elections and 2008 nomination contest, Politics and Technology Review 1: ((2008) ), 11-21. |
[94] | Wirth W., and Schramm H., Media and emotions, Communication Research Trends 24: (3) ((2005) ), 3-39. |
