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Cognitive Style, Selectivity, and Reinforcement: Toward Published as: Rinke, Eike Mark, and Julia Lück. 2010. “Cognitive Style, Selectivity, and Reinforcement: Toward Clarifying the Role of Political Ideology in the Reception of Political Communication.” In Politische Kommunikation Heute: Beiträge des 5. Düsseldorfer Forums Politische Kommunikation, edited by Kathrin Mok and Michael Stahl, 219–34. Berlin, Germany: Frank & Timme. Published version available in public domain courtesy of Frank & Timme publishers. EIKE MARK RINKE & JULIA LÜCK Cognitive Style, Selectivity, and Reinforcement: Toward Clarifying the Role of Political Ideology in the Reception of Political Communication If political communication does not entail uniform effects, what is it really that conditions the consequences of political messages for their recipients? Com- munication researchers have asked this question for a long time and »political predispositions« has been a popular answer for nearly as long. It dates back at least to Lazarsfeld et al.’s familiar »People’s Choice« study (1944) and Hyman and Sheatsley’s (1947) statements that »people seek informationMaterial congenial to their attitudes« (p. 417) and »people will interpret … information in different ways, according to their prior attitudes« (p. 418). These phenomena have later been referred to as selective exposure and selective perception (Klapper, 1960). For various reasons, there has been a resurging interest in scholarship on partisan selectivity in political communication of late. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this line of researchgeschütztes by envisaging an integration of concepts, theories and methodological instruments from the »motivated social cognition approach« (Jost et al., 2003) in political psychology. We take the first steps of this integrative enterprise: First, we outline the relevance of motivated selectivity research in the context of ongoing minimal effects debates. After that, we present readers with the current scope of research in the field of selective exposure and perception. Finally, we sketch a novel approach to research on political partisan selectivities in political communication, one that should paveurheberrechtlich the way for a better understanding of the nature of such selectivi- ties and, by extension, of the different patterns of media effects as they occur along lines of ideological difference. 1 »Minimal Effects«: The Resurgence of a Familiar Paradigm In a recent article, Bennett and Iyengar (2008) suggest that today we are facing »a new era of minimal effects« referring back to a notion developed in 1940s © Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur 219 and early 1950s media effects research. Lazarsfeld and his colleagues (1944) proposed a substitution of the commonsensical paradigm of strong media effects with a model of »limited effects« and Klapper (1960) maintained that if there are any media effects at all they would be highly conditional and depend- ing on predispositions of the audience – thus, what media can do is reinforce existing attitudes and opinions rather than change them. According to Bennett and Iyengar (2008) as well as Stroud (2008), the major difference between the historical situations in the 1940s and the beginning twentieth century is that in the mid-twentieth century social networks (e.g., churches and parties) exerted a stronger influence on the individual predispositions of citizens compared to today’s situation in which ties to such networks have become looser, more flexible, and more temporary. At the same time, opportunities to primarily attend to information that fits existing beliefs have grown due to greater choice of media options. These complementary developments have led to a resurgent interest of scholars in the minimal effects paradigm. In Materiallight of these develop- ments Bennett and Iyengar (2008: 724) conclude: »As media audiences devolve into smaller, like-minded subsets of electorates, it becomes less likely that media messages will do any other than reinforce prior predispositions« This view suggests that sweeping effects of political communication are highly unlikely. But, as Iyengar and Simon (2000) suggest, this does in no way entail that »effects« should be discarded completely.geschütztes Rather, what we are confronted with is an increasing need to properly conceptualize media effects in order to better understand them. They propose what they call a »resonance model« of political communication effects. Such a model is meant to account for interac- tions between features of content or sources of political communication and audience characteristics in the emergence of political communication effects. Underlying this model is the recognition that even if voters might not be persuaded by any particular political message this does not mean that it has no effect at all.urheberrechtlich As has been shown by Holbert (2005), for example, viewing debates between US presidential candidates tends to reinforce voting decisions of Democrats and Republicans rather than to reverse them. However, the reinforcement hypothesis has not gone uncriticized. An illustrative case in point is a study conducted by Chaffee and Miyo (1983), who tested the hy- pothesis in a panel study of adolescents and their parents concluding that reinforcement based on political partisanship only occurs under specific circumstances (e.g., among people with less political experience) – which led them to reject a straightforward generalization of the hypothesis. However, 220 © Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur enormous social and technological change has occurred since the 1980s which seems to warrant a reconsideration of the claims associated with the minimal effects paradigm. A common denominator of early minimal effect theories and their today equivalents is the assumption that people choose and perceive media informa- tion according to their existing predispositions. As was noted above, the two most prominent mechanisms which work to produce minimal effects under- stood as »reinforcement effects« have been those of selective exposure to and selective perception of messages received through mediated communication. Understanding the nature of minimal effects assumptions thus necessitates an understanding of selectivity in media exposure and perception. We will pro- vide a brief review of important milestones in selective exposure and percep- tion research in the following section1, before we propose to draw on the »motivated social cognition« model of ideology from political psychology as a new direction in research on reinforcement effects in politicalMaterial communication. 2 Selective Exposure and Perception: Mechanisms of Partisan Reinforcement Selective exposure research has tried togeschütztes clarify whether, why, how and under which conditions media users tend to selectively expose themselves to media information. Despite the age of the concept, the very concept of selective exposure is still disputed in academic debate (Stroud, 2008; Smith, Fabrigar, & Norris, 2008). The task before us here is to present the evidence for an assump- tion of widespread contemporary selective exposure and contrast it with evidence for the alternative rival hypothesis that giving people access to more and more information leads to them being confronted with diverse opinions and worldviewsurheberrechtlich as well as being more informed and open-minded. To this end, our first step will be to explain the concept of selective exposure before giving a brief review of traditional as well as more recent research in this field. One of the first theories where selective exposure was a central approach to explain how people choose information was Festinger’s »Theory of Cognitive Dissonance« (1957). This work has been a frequent subject of academic disputes, with some arguing for its validity (e.g., D’Alessio & Allen, 2002) and ............................................ 1 For a more extended recent review of selective exposure research, see Smith, Fabrigar, & Norris (2008). © Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur 221 others arguing against its empirical evidence (e.g., Donsbach, 1991). Notwith- standing these disputes, its heavy influence on selective exposure research is beyond question. Festinger argued that an urge to avoid cognitive dissonance is a universal human trait and that there is a universal need for cognitive closure in humans. This means that people avoid information that is inconsis- tent to the existing opinions and more or less ignore information that does not fit into their own worldview. Consequently, in his view, selective exposure is a key strategic action to reduce intraindividual dissonance. A decade later, Sears and Freedman (1967) published a widely regarded overview of then-available selective exposure research, in an attempt to rectify conceptual inconsistencies and clarify the empirical evidence available at the time. One of their major conclusions was that rather than looking for selectiv- ity in exposure to attitude-inconsistent information it might be more useful to investigate partisan selectivity in the perception (in their words: evaluation) of such information. In the conceptual part of their exposition,Material they distinguish three different definitions of selective exposure. These distinctions are still important to bear in mind when dealing with this concept. The first notion of selective exposure they identified was as »[a]ny systematic bias in audience composition« (Sears & Freedman, 1967: 195). Here, selective exposure
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