Age, gender, personality, ideological attitudes and individual differences in a person's news spectrum: how many and who might be prone to “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers” online?
Open accessAbstract
Potential effects of demographics, personality, and ideological attitudes on the number of news sources consumed should be investigated. The number of news sources consumed, in turn, was seen as inverse proxy for the susceptibility to be caught in "filter bubbles" and/or "echo chambers" (online), which are hotly discussed topics also in politics. A sample of 1,681 ( n = 557 males) participants provided data on demographics, the Big Five as well as Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) alongside the number of different news sources consumed and current voting preferences. Results showed that age (positively), gender (higher in males), Openness (positively), and RWA (negatively) predicted the number of different news sources consumed. The group of participants consuming news exclusively offline showed highest scores in Conscientiousness and lowest scores in Neuroticism compared to the "news feeds only" and the "news feeds and online" groups. However, less than 5% of the participants exclusively consumed news via news feeds of social networking sites. Participants who stated that they would not vote reported the lowest number of different news sources consumed. These findings reveal first insights into predisposing factors for the susceptibility to be caught in "filter bubbles" and/or "echo chamber" online and how this might be associated with voting preferences.
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Los algoritmos analizan nuestra huella digital y movimientos por la red, predicen y muestran de manera personalizada contenidos afines a las conductas de búsqueda.
“Estos algoritmos analizan nuestra huella digital y movimientos por la red, predicen y muestran de manera personalizada, contenidos afines a las conductas de búsqueda (Sindermann et al., 2020).”
From Homofilia, polarización afectiva y desinformación en Twitter. Caso de estudio sobre la crisis migratoria #Openarms (2021) · cites this paper as Sindermann et al., 2020
The Introduction (page unavailable) describes prediction algorithms that analyze data about individuals and present each person with personalized information. It does not specify that the data are their movements around the web or that the content shown matches their search behavior. (LLM, conf=0.82)
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Cites
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“Specifically, RWA is strongly interrelated with political conservatism (Duckitt et al., 2010; Jost et al., 2003).”
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- Authors
- Sindermann, C., Elhai, J. D., Moshagen, M., & Montag, C.
- Affiliations
- Universität Ulm (DE)
- University of Toledo (US)
- Corresponding author
- Sindermann, Cornelia
- Montag, Christian
- Venue
- Heliyon
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2020-01
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- e03214
- ISSN
- 2405-8440 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC7002846
- OpenAlex
- W2999336006
- Cited by
- 78
- References
- 7
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 15 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 24 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 1
- FWCI
- 17.39
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Heliyon (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- OPen Access Repositorium der Universität Ulm (OPARU) (Ulm University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Universität Ulm, Kommunikations- und Informationszentrum (kiz) (cc-by)
- Funders
- German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (MO2363/3-2)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Media Influence and Politics
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Keywords
- filter bubbles, echo chambers, news consumption, news sources, Big Five personality traits, right-wing authoritarianism, ideological attitudes, social networking sites, voter preferences, individual differences, age and gender differences
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