Confirmation Bias in Online Searches: Impacts of Selective Exposure Before an Election on Political Attitude Strength and Shifts
Open accessAbstract
Impacts of Internet use on political information seeking and subsequent processes have been subject to much debate. A 2-session online field study presented online search results on political topics to examine selective exposure and its attitudinal impacts. Session 1 captured attitudes, including their accessibility. Session 2 tracked what online search results participants selected and how long they read them; participants then reported attitudes again. The study represented a 4x8x2x2 within-subjects design: 4 topics, 8 browsing intervals each, with articles presenting opposing stances, with low versus high source credibility. Attitude-consistent messages and messages from high-credibility sources were preferred. Exposure to attitude-consistent search results increased attitude accessibility and reinforced attitudes, whereas exposure to attitude-discrepant content had opposite effects, regardless of messages' source credibility.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Attitude strength in politically relevant domains increases selective exposure constitutive of confirmation bias.
“In fact, in psychology, attitude strength, especially, in politically relevant domains of thinking has long been and still is widely accepted to increase the kind of selective exposure constitutive of confirmation bias (Knobloch-Westerwick et al. 2015: 173).”
From What Is the Function of Confirmation Bias? (2022) · cites this paper as Knobloch-Westerwick et al. 2015: 173
The available passage is a bibliographic entry, not a discussion of attitude strength or selective exposure. Searches for the claimed relationship and for preferences for attitude-consistent political information returned no substantive passage, so our copy does not establish whether the paper supports the claim. (LLM, conf=0.72)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
No citation lists for this paper
No citation lists for this paper yet — checked again daily.
References 43 · Cited by 167
- Authors
- Knobloch-Westerwick, S., Johnson, B. K., & Westerwick, A.
- Affiliations
- School of Communication; The Ohio State University; 3020 Derby Hall Columbus OH 43210
- Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (NL)
- The Ohio State University (US)
- ORCID
- Johnson, Benjamin K.
- Venue
- Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2014-11-10
- Volume
- 20
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 171-187
- ISSN
- 1083-6101 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1971070829
- Cited by
- 167
- References
- 43
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 16 · 2024: 22 · 2023: 21 · 2022: 23 · 2021: 19 · 2020: 19 · 2019: 16 · 2018: 11 · 2017: 7 · 2016: 5 · 2015: 1
- FWCI
- 12.77
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- research.vu.nl
- Licence
- Locations
- Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (publishedVersion)
- VU Research Portal (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Media Influence and Politics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Keywords
- confirmation bias, selective exposure, online search, political information seeking, attitude accessibility, attitude strength, attitude change, source credibility, political attitudes, political campaigns
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
