Abstract
This dissertation investigates the effects of intergroup relations and discursive quality on deliberative outcomes of cross-cutting exposure in comment sections on news websites. Specifically, it focuses on how individuals process and respond to counter-attitudinal comments from various social groups and how they react to disagreements expressed in different tones. To elucidate the processes that individuals go through when defensively attending to oppositional views, this work proposes several distinct types of defensive reactions and validates them as the underlying mechanisms for defensive processing. The defense mechanisms that enable people to resist persuasion include message rejection (i.e., discounting message quality), source derogation (i.e., derogating source credibility), comprehension avoidance (i.e., avoiding in-depth message processing), and counterargument production (i.e., generating counterarguments to refute contrary views).A two-session online experiment with a 2 (group membership: in-group vs. out-group) × 2 (comment tone: civil vs. uncivil) between-subjects factorial design was conducted. The results indicated that exposure to counter-attitudinal comments from in-group members, compared to out-group members, led to greater opinion conformity, more favorable attitudes toward the contrary views, more open-mindedness, and less expression of disagreement. Moreover, when faced with counter-attitudinal comments expressed in an uncivil tone, individuals showed less favorable attitudes toward opposite viewpoints. Contrary to the predictions, the presence of uncivil discourse did not affect opinion conformity, open-mindedness, willingness to speak out, and public expression of agreement and disagreement.
Additionally, the results revealed a significant interaction between group membership and comment tone on the public expression of disagreement. When counter-attitudinal comments were uncivil, individuals exposed to in-group comments expressed less dissent in their replies than those exposed to out-group comments. This tendency, however, was not significant when the contrary comments were expressed in a civil tone.
The results also showed that the proposed mechanisms underlying defensive processing significantly mediated the effects of group membership and comment tone on deliberative outcomes. In the presence of salient identity cues signaling in-group membership, individuals were less likely to discount comment quality, derogate commenter credibility, and generate counterarguments to refute the opposite position. Such reduced defensive responses, in turn, caused differential effects on outcome variables (i.e., opinion conformity, opinion perception, and opinion expression). Furthermore, individuals reacted more defensively to uncivil counter-attitudinal comments than to civil counterparts. Exposure to uncivil threads undermined perceptions of comment quality and commenter credibility and triggered more counterarguments, which subsequently produced divergent attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. The current findings offer meaningful contributions to the existing theories in computer-mediated communication (e.g., the social identity model of deindividuation effects) and fill a significant gap in the literature on defensive processing. The findings also provide methodological implications for research on online deliberation and practical implications for developing deliberative public spheres.
| Date of Award | 7 Jun 2021 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Ki Joon KIM (Supervisor) |