Selecting Our Own Science: How Communication Contexts and Individual Traits Shape Information Seeking

We use an experiment with a nationally representative sample of the U.S. population to examine how political partisans consume and process media reports about nanotechnology—a scientific issue that is unfamiliar to most Americans. We manipulate the extent to which participants receive ideological cues contextualizing a news article, and follow their subsequent information seeking about nanotechnology. Our results provide insights into patterns of media use and how media use differs among people with varying political ideologies. When cues clarifying the political stakes of nanotechnology are made available, individuals are willing to read information from countervailing sources. When such cues are lacking, however, individuals avoid incongruent information and opt for headlines from attitude-consistent sources. We explore variations in the circumstances under which ideological selectivity occurs and demonstrate that both confirmation bias and defensive avoidance are heightened under such conditions.