Exposure to Extremely Partisan News from the Other Political Side Shows Scarce Boomerang Effects

Exposure to Extremely Partisan News from the Other Political Side Shows Scarce Boomerang Effects. Andreu Casas, Ericka Menchen-Trevino & Magdalena Wojcieszak. Political Behavior, Feb 3 2022. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-021-09769-9

Abstract: A narrow information diet may be partly to blame for the growing political divides in the United States, suggesting exposure to dissimilar views as a remedy. These efforts, however, could be counterproductive, exacerbating attitude and affective polarization. Yet findings on whether such boomerang effect exists are mixed and the consequences of dissimilar exposure on other important outcomes remain unexplored. To contribute to this debate, we rely on a preregistered longitudinal experimental design combining participants’ survey self-reports and their behavioral browsing data, in which one should observe boomerang effects. We incentivized liberals to read political articles on extreme conservative outlets (Breitbart, The American Spectator, and The Blaze) and conservatives to read extreme left-leaning sites (Mother Jones, Democracy Now, and The Nation). We maximize ecological validity by embedding the treatment in a larger project that tracks over time changes in online exposure and attitudes. We explored the effects on attitude and affective polarization, as well as on perceptions of the political system, support for democratic principles, and personal well-being. Overall we find little evidence of boomerang effects.

Discussion

In the US, political understanding is needed more than ever. To achieve this elusive goal, scholars and practitioners encourage exposure to dissimilar political views, with the hope that encountering views that challenge one’s beliefs will minimize extremity and interparty hostility. Although some scholars caution against this approach, suggesting that cross-cutting exposure can increase polarization, the evidence of such boomerang effects is mixed and quite limited in scope.

We set out to contribute solving this debate with an innovative experimental design combining incentivized over time exposure to extreme news domains from across the aisle (Breitbart, The American Spectator, and The Blaze for liberals; and Mother Jones, Democracy Now, and The Nation for conservatives), pre-, post-, and intermediate surveys, trace data on actual online exposure, and participants’s open-ended reactions to the outlets tested. Although this design is counterfactual (after all, most liberals are unlikely to regularly visit Breitbart), it was well suited to detecting boomerang effects if these are in fact a likely outcome of cross-cutting exposure. The design also allowed us to test whether the studied exposure impacts broader societal outcomes and individual well-being, and also for whom these effects emerge.

In short, despite the over-time nature of the treatment (i.e., 12 days), accounting for intended treatment effects as well as the levels of compliance, and testing attitude polarization on a range of salient issues and affective polarization with several indicators and toward various out-groups, we show that cross-cutting exposure is unlikely to intensify political conflict or have any substantive effects on the societal and individual outcomes tested. People did not radicalize their issue attitudes nor their feelings towards the out-party and the supporters of the opposing ideology. Although we did find that people became slightly more negative toward those holding opposing views on a few policies (e.g., climate change and immigration), these effects were minor (< 0.2 standard deviation changes) and did not hold when accounting for multiple comparisons and false discovery rate. Furthermore, although observers fear that strong partisans are most likely to radicalize and drive political conflict, we do not find pronounced heterogeneous effects.

Similarly, our treatment did little to influence participants’ perceptions of the political system, in terms of their support for compromise, attributing malevolent intentions to the outparty, or seeing the polity as polarized. It also did not shift their support for key democratic principles, such as freedom of speech or freedom of the press. Relatedly, extreme cross-cutting exposure did not worsen participants’ well-being.

The findings are a great contribution to the existing literature on the potential negative effects of exposure to counter-attitudinal information. Contrary to some evidence, which finds exposure to opposing views to exacerbate polarization (Levendusky, 2013; Bail et al., 2018; Garrett et al., 2014), and in line with other recent work (Guess & Coppock, 2018; Guess et al., 2021; Levy, 2021), we conclude that boomerang effect are the exception rather than the norm. Extending past work by incorporating people’s evaluations of the outlets and articles (based on short surveys and also open-ended thoughts and emotions), this consistent lack of boomerang effects may be due to people’s largely neutral or even positive reactions to the outlets and their content. We wanted to test the effect of a counterfactual and selected these 6 sites because they are considered far left and far right in most classifications of news media ideology (Robertson et al., 2018; Eady et al., 2019). Nevertheless, despite representing the extreme of each ideological side,Footnote18 and despite being vilified by one’s partisan group, our participants sometimes valued the information they consumed therein. In addition, this study also makes a relevant contribution to the growing body of work that uses trace data to study people’s attitudes and behavior (Stier et al., 2020; Guess, 2021; Guess et al., 2021; Wojcieszak et al., 2021b). Rather than relying on a forced exposure experiment that shows people mock sites with counter-attitudinal articles, we incentivized exposure, accounted for compliance, and exposed them to real articles that actually appeared in news outlets of the opposing ideology. At a time where key stakeholders such as social media companies (Farr and dorsey, 2018; Wood & Ethan, 2020), news organizations (Goodman & Chen, 2010), and governments (Rendall, 2015; Commission, 2013) are designing policies to reduce polarization, we believe that the findings reported here can help inform the decision-making process moving forward.