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Perceptions of newsworthiness are contaminated by a political usefulness bias

Are people's perceptions of the newsworthiness of events biased by a tendency to rate as more important any news story that seems likely to lead others to share their own political attitudes? To assess this, we created six pairs of hypothetical news stories, each describing an event that seemed...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Pashler, Harold, Heriot, Gail
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Royal Society Publishing 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6124072/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30224994
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.172239
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author Pashler, Harold
Heriot, Gail
author_facet Pashler, Harold
Heriot, Gail
author_sort Pashler, Harold
collection PubMed
description Are people's perceptions of the newsworthiness of events biased by a tendency to rate as more important any news story that seems likely to lead others to share their own political attitudes? To assess this, we created six pairs of hypothetical news stories, each describing an event that seemed likely to encourage people to adopt attitudes on the opposite side of a particular controversial issue (e.g. affirmative action and gay marriage). In total, 569 subjects were asked to evaluate the importance of these stories ‘to the readership of a general-circulation newspaper’, disregarding how interesting they happened to find the event. Subjects later indicated their own personal attitudes to the underlying political issues. Predicted crossover interactions were confirmed for all six issues. All the interactions took the form of subjects rating stories offering ‘ammunition’ for their own side of the controversial issue as possessing greater intrinsic news importance.
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spelling pubmed-61240722018-09-17 Perceptions of newsworthiness are contaminated by a political usefulness bias Pashler, Harold Heriot, Gail R Soc Open Sci Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience Are people's perceptions of the newsworthiness of events biased by a tendency to rate as more important any news story that seems likely to lead others to share their own political attitudes? To assess this, we created six pairs of hypothetical news stories, each describing an event that seemed likely to encourage people to adopt attitudes on the opposite side of a particular controversial issue (e.g. affirmative action and gay marriage). In total, 569 subjects were asked to evaluate the importance of these stories ‘to the readership of a general-circulation newspaper’, disregarding how interesting they happened to find the event. Subjects later indicated their own personal attitudes to the underlying political issues. Predicted crossover interactions were confirmed for all six issues. All the interactions took the form of subjects rating stories offering ‘ammunition’ for their own side of the controversial issue as possessing greater intrinsic news importance. The Royal Society Publishing 2018-08-01 /pmc/articles/PMC6124072/ /pubmed/30224994 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.172239 Text en © 2018 The Authors. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
Pashler, Harold
Heriot, Gail
Perceptions of newsworthiness are contaminated by a political usefulness bias
title Perceptions of newsworthiness are contaminated by a political usefulness bias
title_full Perceptions of newsworthiness are contaminated by a political usefulness bias
title_fullStr Perceptions of newsworthiness are contaminated by a political usefulness bias
title_full_unstemmed Perceptions of newsworthiness are contaminated by a political usefulness bias
title_short Perceptions of newsworthiness are contaminated by a political usefulness bias
title_sort perceptions of newsworthiness are contaminated by a political usefulness bias
topic Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6124072/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30224994
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.172239
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