Forced Versus Selective Exposure: Threatening Messages Lead to Anger but Not Dislike of Political Opponents
Abstract
When people use social networking sites, they may be exposed to political content they have chosen (selective exposure) and content they have not chosen (forced exposure). Counter-attitudinal content that people have not chosen can provoke them to resist persuasion by counterarguing and disliking their political opponents. I test these assumptions by exposing participants to threatening and uncivil Facebook comments about refugee immigration consistent or inconsistent with their preferred choice (i.e., pro-attitudinal or counter-attitudinal exposure). Using a preregistered 2 × 3 × 2 quasi-randomized web survey experiment ( n = 2,514), the results indicate that people who are exposed to threatening and uncivil comments they have not chosen become angry and start to counterargue. However, they do not necessarily start to dislike their political opponents. This article contributes to discussions about affective polarization and psychological reactance. More specifically, social networking sites that try to expose users to opposing viewpoints by design, so that users are incidentally exposed to content they do not want to see, may unintentionally create hostility instead.
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Entrar en contacto con contenido contra-actitudinal puede generar una resistencia emocional y una sensación de amenaza que terminen polarizando igualmente al individuo.
“Entrar en contacto con contenido contra-actitudinal puede generar una resistencia emocional y una sensación de amenaza que terminen polarizando igualmente al individuo (Bail et al., 2018;Dahlgren, 2022).”
From Política, uso de medios y polarización afectiva en España (2024) · cites this paper as Dahlgren, 2022
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“…de control, además de las habituales sociodemográficas como sexo, edad y nivel educativo, este estudio tiene en cuenta el interés en la polí-tica (Dahlgren, 2022; Skovsgaard, Shehata y Strömbäck, 2016; Warner, 2018), el in-terés en la campaña electoral (Rodríguez, Santamaría y Miller, 2022), la…”
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- Authors
- Dahlgren, P. M.
- Affiliations
- University of Gothenburg (SE)
- Corresponding author
- Dahlgren, Peter M.
- ORCID
- Dahlgren, Peter M.
- Venue
- Journal of Media Psychology
- Publisher
- Hogrefe Publishing Group
- Published
- 2022-05
- Volume
- 34
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 150-164
- ISSN
- 1864-1105 (ISSN-L)
- 2151-2388
- OpenAlex
- W3184465547
- Cited by
- 7
- References
- 46
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 1
- FWCI
- 1.91
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of Media Psychology Theories Methods and Applications (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Media Influence and Politics
- Keywords
- forced exposure, selective exposure, counterargument, affective polarization, reactance, social networking sites, Facebook comments, political hostility
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