Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T19:38:24.684Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Through the Grapevine: Informational Consequences of Interpersonal Political Communication

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2019

TAYLOR N. CARLSON Open the ORCID record for TAYLOR N. CARLSON [Opens in a new window]
TAYLOR N. CARLSON*
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
*
*Taylor N. Carlson, PhD Candidate, University of California, San Diego, [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Much of the US public acquires political information socially. However, the consequences of acquiring information from others instead of the media are under-explored. I conduct a “telephone-game” experiment to examine how information changes as it flows from official reports to news outlets to other people, finding that social information is empirically different from news articles. In a second experiment on a nationally representative sample, I randomly assign participants to read a news article or a social message about that article generated in Study 1. Participants exposed to social information learned significantly less than participants who were exposed to the news article. However, individuals exposed to information from someone who is like-minded and knowledgeable learned the same objective facts as those who received information from the media. Although participants learned the same factual information from these ideal informants as they did from the media, they had different subjective evaluations.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 113 , Issue 2 , May 2019 , pp. 325 - 339
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I thank James Fowler, Seth Hill, Marisa Abrajano, Margaret Roberts, Charles McClean, Andrew Engelhardt, Matthew Pietryka, and Nazita Lajevardi for invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this paper and the research design. I am grateful to Jaime Settle for endless support and encouragement. I thank participants at UCSD’s integrated and American Politics workshops, and Human Nature Group. I am also grateful for feedback from MPSA 2018, New Faces in Political Methodology X, Yale’s CSAP conference, the 2018 Political Networks Conference, the College of William and Mary Government Department, and the 2018 Political Communication APSA Pre-Conference. This research was generously supported by the National Science Foundation (SES 1423788). Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NOWHWG.

References

REFERENCES

Aarøe, Lene, and Petersen, Michael Bang. 2018. “Cognitive Biases and Communication Strength in Social Networks: The Case of Episodic Frames.” British Journal of Political Science 1–21. Published online 22 October 2018. DOI: 10.1017/S0007123418000273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ahn, T. K., Huckfeldt, Robert, and Ryan, John Barry. 2014. Experts, Activists, and Democratic Politics: Are Electorates Self-Educating? Cambridge Studies in Public Opinion and Political Psychology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Arceneaux, Kevin, and Johnson, Martin. 2013. Changing Minds or Changing Channels? Partisan News in an Age of Choice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bartels, Larry M. 1993. “Messages Received: The Political Impact of Media Exposure.” American Political Science Review 87 (2): 267–85.Google Scholar
Baum, Matthew A. 2002. “Sex, Lies, and War: How Soft News Brings Foreign Policy to the Inattentive Public.” American Political Science Review 96 (1): 91–109.Google Scholar
Benoit, Kenneth, Watanabe, Kohei, Wang, Haiyan, Nulty, Paul, Obeng, Adam, Müller, Stefan, Matsuo, Akitaka, Perry, Patrick O., Kuha, Jouni, Lauderdale, Benjamin, and Lowe, William. 2018. “Quanteda: An R Package for the Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data.” Journal of Open Source Software, 3 (30): 774. https://quanteda.io.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berelson, Bernard R., Lazarsfeld, Paul F., and McPhee, William N.. 1954. Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Berinsky, Adam J., Huber, Gregory A., and Lenz, Gabriel S.. 2012. “Evaluating Online Labor Markets for Experimental Research: Amazon. Com’s Mechanical Turk.” Political Analysis 20 (3): 351–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Budak, Ceren, Goel, Sharad, and Rao, Justin M.. 2016. “Fair and Balanced? Quantifying Media Bias through Crowdsourced Content Analysis.” Public Opinion Quarterly 80 (1): 250–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip E., Miller, Warren E., and Stokes, Donald E.. 1960. The American Voter. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Carlson, Taylor N. 2018. “Modeling Political Information Transmission as a Game of Telephone.” The Journal of Politics 80 (1).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Conover, Michael, Ratkiewicz, Jacob, Francisco, Matthew R., Goncalves, Bruno, Menczer, Filippo, and Flammini, Alessandro. 2011. “Political Polarization on Twitter.” ICWSM 133: 89–96.Google Scholar
Coppock, Alexander Edwards. 2016. “Positive, Small, Homogeneous, and Durable: Political Persuasion in Response to Information.” PhD thesis, Columbia University.Google Scholar
Delli Carpini, Michael X., and Keeter, Scott. 1996. What Americans Know about Politics and Why it Matters. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Downs, Anthony. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York, NY: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Drew, Dan, and Weaver, David H.. 1990. “Media Attention, Media Exposure, and Media Effects.” Journalism Quarterly 67 (4): 740–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Druckman, James N., Levendusky, Matthew, and McLain, Audrey. 2018. “No Need to Watch: How the Effects of Partisan Media Can Spread via Inter-Personal Discussions.” American Journal of Political Science 62 (1): 99–112.Google Scholar
Ellison, Glenn, and Fudenberg, Drew. 1995. “Word-of-Mouth Communication and Social Learning.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 110 (1): 93–125.Google Scholar
Erisen, Cengiz, Redlawsk, David P., and Erisen, Elif. 2017. “Complex Thinking as a Result of Incongruent Information Exposure.” American Politics Research 46 (2): 217–45.Google Scholar
Eveland, William P. 2001. “The Cognitive Mediation Model of Learning from the News: Evidence from Nonelection, Off-Year Election, and Presidential Election Context.” Communication Research 28: 571–601.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flaxman, Seth, Goel, Sharad, and Rao, Justin M.. 2016. “Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption.” Public Opinion Quarterly 80 (S1): 298–320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaines, Brian J., Kuklinski, James H., Quirk, Paul J., Peyton, Buddy, and Verkuilen, Jay. 2007. “Same facts, Different Interpretations: Partisan Motivation and Opinion on Iraq.” The Journal of Politics 69 (4): 957–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gottfried, Jeffrey, and Shearer, Elisa. 2016. “News Use across Social Media Platforms 2016.” Pew Research Center. http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/.Google Scholar
Graves, Lucas, Nyhan, Brendan, and Reifler, Jason. 2016. “Understanding Innovations in Journalistic Practice: A Field Experiment Examining Motivations for Fact-Checking.” Journal of Communication 66 (1): 102–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hill, Seth J. 2017. “Learning Together Slowly: Bayesian Learning about Political Facts.” The Journal of Politics 79 (4): 1403–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hill, Seth J., and Roberts, Margaret E.. 2019. “Media Informativeness and Credibility in China and the United States.” Working Paper. January 2019. https://www.sethjhill.com/research-w-abstracts.htm#27.Google Scholar
Hovland, Carl I. 1948. “Social Communication.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 92 (5): 371–75.Google Scholar
Huang, Anna. 2008. “Similarity Measures for Text Document Clustering.” In Proceedings of the Sixth New Zealand Computer Science Research Student Conference (NZCSRSC2008), Christchurch, New Zealand, 49–56.Google Scholar
Huckfeldt, Robert, and Sprague, John. 1995. Citizens, Politics, and Social Communication: Information and Influence in an Election Campaign. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huckfeldt, Robert, Beck, Paul Allen, Dalton, Russell J., and Levine, Jeffrey. 1995. “Political Environments, Cohesive Social Groups, and the Communication of Public Opinion.” American Journal of Political Science 39 (4): 1025–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huckfeldt, Robert, Johnson, Paul E., and Sprague, John. 2004. Political Disagreement: The Survival of Diverse Opinions within Communication Networks. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iyengar, Shanto, and Kinder, Donald R.. 1987. News that Matters: Agenda-Setting and Priming in a Television Age. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Katz, Elihu. 1957. “The Two-Step Flow of Communication: An Up-To-Date Report on an Hypothesis.” Public Opinion Quarterly 21 (1): 61–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Katz, Elihu, and Lazarsfeld, Paul F.. 1955. Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications. New York, NY: Free Press.Google Scholar
Kim, Jim Woo. 2017. “Assessing Civic Competence against the Normative Benchmark of Considered Opinions.” PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Krupnikov, Yanna, and Levine, Adam Seth. 2014. “Cross-Sample Comparisons and External Validity.” Journal of Experimental Political Science 1: 59–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuklinski, James H., Quirk, Paul J., Jerit, Jennifer, Schwieder, David, and Rich., Robert F. 2000. “Misinformation and the Currency of Democratic Citizenship.” The Journal of Politics 62 (3): 790–816.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kunda, Ziva. 1990. “The Case for Motivated Reasoning.” Psychological Bulletin 8 (3): 480–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levendusky, Matthew. 2013. How Partisan Media Polarized America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lodge, Milton, and Taber, Charles S.. 2000. “Three Steps toward a Theory of Motivated Political Reasoning.” In Elements of Reason: Cognition, Choice, and the Bounds of Rationality, eds. Lupia, Arthur, McCubbins, Mathew D., and Popkin, Samuel. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 183–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lodge, Milton, and Taber, Charles S.. 2013. The Rationalizing Voter. Cambridge UK: Cambridge Universtiy Press.Google Scholar
Lupia, Arthur, and McCubbins, Mathew D.. 1998. The Democratic Dilemma: Can Citizens Learn what They Need to Know? Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Moussaïd, Mehdi, Brighton, Henry, and Gaissmaier, Wolfgang. 2015. “The Amplification of Risk in Experimental Diffusion Chains.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112 (18): 5631–6.Google ScholarPubMed
Mullinix, Kevin J., Leeper, Thomas J., Druckman, James N., and Freese., Jeremy 2015. “The Generalizability of Survey Experiments.” Journal of Experimental Political Science 2 (2): 109–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nyhan, Brendan, Porter, Ethan, Reifler, Jason, and Wood, Thomas. 2019. “Taking Fact-checks Literally But Not Seriously? The Effects of Journalistic Fact-checking on Factual Beliefs and Candidate Favorability.” Political Behavior 1–22. Published online 21 January 2019.Google Scholar
Popkin, Samuel L. 1994. The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Redlawsk, David P. 2002. “Hot Cognition or Cool Consideration? Testing the Effects of Motivated Reasoning on Political Decision Making.” The Journal of Politics 64 (4): 1021–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ryan, John Barry. 2011. “Accuracy and Bias in Perceptions of Political Knowledge.” Political Behavior 33 (2): 335–56.Google Scholar
Taber, Charles S., and Lodge, Milton. 2006. “Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs.” American Journal of Political Science 50 (3): 755–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weaver, David H. 1996. “What Voters Learn from Media.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 546 (1): 34–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wei, Ran, and Lo, Ven-hwei. 2008. “News Media Use and Knowledge about the 2006 US Midterm Elections: Why Exposure Matters in Voter Learning.” International Journal of Public Opinion Research 20 (3): 347–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zaller, John R. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Carlson Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NOWHWG
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Carlson supplementary material

Carlson supplementary material 1

Download Carlson supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 760.5 KB
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.