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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...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
The Royal Society Publishing
2018
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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. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6124072 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2018 |
publisher | The Royal Society Publishing |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
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 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT pashlerharold perceptionsofnewsworthinessarecontaminatedbyapoliticalusefulnessbias AT heriotgail perceptionsofnewsworthinessarecontaminatedbyapoliticalusefulnessbias |