Feeling Validated Versus Being Correct:A Meta-Analysis of Selective Exposure to Information

By W. Hart, Dolores Albarracin, A. Eagly, I. Brechan, Matthew J. Lindberg, Lisa A Merrill. Psychological bulletin, 2009

1,197 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A meta-analysis assessed whether exposure to information is guided by defense or accuracy motives. The studies examined information preferences in relation to attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors in situations that provided choices between congenial information, which supported participants' pre-existing attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors, and uncongenial information, which challenged these tendencies. Analyses indicated a moderate preference for congenial over uncongenial information (d. = 0.36). As predicted, this congeniality bias was moderated by variables that affect the strength of participants' defense motivation and accuracy motivation. In support of the importance of defense motivation, the congeniality bias was weaker when participants' attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors were supported prior to information selection, when participants' attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors were not relevant to their values or not held with conviction, when the available information was low in quality, when participants' closed-mindedness was low, and when their confidence in the attitude, belief, or behavior was high. In support of the importance of accuracy motivation, an uncongeniality bias emerged when uncongenial information was relevant to accomplishing a current goal.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/336c26a1bf811836edaefa745fd32be92f8530fe

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In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

The Effects of Social Influence and Cognitive Dissonance on Travel Purchase Decisions (2015, background): “A meta-analysis of nearly 50 years of selective exposure research obtained support for this bias in defensive situations that characterize dissonance research (Hart et al. 2009).”
Media Effects: Theory and Research. (2016, background): “There has been ample research on selective exposure and selective recall, but less on selective reception processes (Hart et al 2009).”
Political Parties, Motivated Reasoning, and Public Opinion Formation (2014, background): “Kunda offers “wish” and “desire” as synonyms for motivation. stimuli” (Hart et al., 2009, p. 557) and “directional motivation” because of the term’s necessary breadth, though many of the directional goals we will discuss are “defensive” of particular identities, attitudes, or beliefs.17 These…”
Defying conventional wisdom: A meta-analytical examination of the differences between demographic and job-related diversity relationships with performance (2012, methodology): “In our analyses, we examined the results of fixed or random models, depending on whether general or specific relationships among the variables were of interest (cf. Hart et al., 2009).”
Defensive reactions to health-promoting information: an overview and implications for future research (2013, background): “Other overviews discussed evidence of motivated reasoning in a whole range of situations (Hart et al., 2009; Kunda, 1990), while the present article is only concerned with defensive reactions in a health-communication context.”
Political Online Information Searching in Germany and the United States: Confirmation Bias, Source Credibility, and Attitude Impacts (2015, background): “…that a meta-analysis on a “congeniality bias” in various domains (political, business, health, religious/value-related, or purchase information) by Hart et al. (2009) included research from North America and German-speaking countries but did not find a significant effect of this potential…”
Biased Evaluation of Abstracts Depending on Topic and Conclusion: Further Evidence of a Confirmation Bias Within Scientific Psychology (2010, result): “A possible explanation could be that the academic psychologists in our sample subjected the abstracts inconsistent with their prior beliefs to more skeptical analysis ( Hart et al. 2009 ).”
Anger, Fear, and Echo Chambers: The Emotional Basis for Online Behavior (2019, background): “Contradicting information or messages are unpleasant and create dissonance, and this is therefore something most people want to avoid (Festinger, 1962; Hart et al., 2009).”
Confirmation biases in selective exposure to political online information: Source bias vs. content bias (2017, background): “First off, both NFC and CR moderated the confirmation bias, which adds to the scarce insight on what traits affect this phenomenon (Hart et al., 2009; Smith et al., 2008).”
Online Reviews (2016, background): “Basically, the effect of the temporal distance was attenuated because under low information load, consumers have a higher cognitive capacity and a stronger motivation to process information that is inconsistent with their motivational state (Yoon, Sarial-Abi, and Gürhan-Canli 2012; Wang and Lee 2006”