Unveiling the Other Side : Defensive Avoidance Approach in Reinforcing Spirals of Selective Exposure and Attitudes

A large body of literature has focused on dynamic interactions between selective exposure and attitudes/beliefs/behaviors. However, attention has concentrated on confirmation bias as the primary expression of selective exposure, while the relationship between attitudes/beliefs/behaviors and defensive avoidance has been neglected. We therefore propose an extended version of the Reinforcing Spiral Model (RSM)—Parallel Reinforcing Spiral Model (PRSM)—which encompasses both confirmation bias and defensive avoidance as parallel pathways affecting the relationship between selective exposure and attitudes and behaviors. Further, we examined the PRSM with three waves of panel survey data (n = 920) collected in Hong Kong. We found that both confirmation bias and avoidance have a significant mutual influencing relationship with policy preference in the COVID-19 pandemic context. Other implications and limitations of our extended PRSM model are discussed.