Confirmation bias, as the term is typically used in the psychological literature, connotes the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis in hand. The author reviews evidence of such a bias in a variety of guises and gives examples of its operation in several practical contexts. Possible explanations are considered, and the question of its utility or disutility is discussed. When men wish to construct or support a theory, how they torture facts into their service! (Mackay, 1852/ 1932, p. 552) Confirmation bias is perhaps the best known and most widely accepted notion of inferential error to come out of the literature on human reasoning. (Evans, 1989, p. 41) If one were to attempt to identify a single problematic aspect of human reasoning that deserves attention above all others, the confirmation bias would have to be among the candidates for consideration. Many have written about this bias, and it appears to be sufficiently strong and pervasive that one is led to wonder whether the bias, by itself, might account for a significant fraction of the disputes, altercations, and misunderstandings that occur among individuals, groups, and nations. Confirmation bias has been used in the psychological literature to refer to a variety of phenomena. Here I take the term to represent a generic concept that subsumes several more specific ideas that connote the inappropriate bolstering of hypotheses or beliefs whose truth is in question.

The effectiveness of advertising messages is widely believed to be moderated by audience involvement. In this paper, psychological theories of attention and levels of processing are used to establish a framework that can accommodate the major consumer behavior theories of audience involvement. Four levels of involvement are identified (in order from low to high) as preattention, focal attention, comprehension, and elaboration. These levels allocate increasing attentional capacity to a message source, as needed for analysis of the message by increasingly abstract -- and qualitatively distinct -- representational systems. Lower levels use relatively little capacity and extract information needed to determine whether higher levels will be invoked. The higher levels require greater capacity and result in increasingly durable cognitive and attitudinal effects.

This study considers media effects on behavior that are mediated through other social institutions. Examined is the extent to which changes over time in the amount of media attention to the issue of drunk driving (DD) may have contributed to the reduction in DD behavior between 1978 and 1996. It was hypothesized that media effects on DD behavior were mediated by policy response (i.e., legislation) to the DD problem. Aggregated measures of media attention, legislation, and DD behavior for 38 consecutive 6-month periods were used in a time-series regression analysis. Results indicate that although substantial direct media effects on DD-related legislation and behavior were present, the direct effect of media on behavior was no longer significant when the effect of legislation on behavior was controlled. These results suggest that future research efforts to uncover media effects on human behavior may benefit from considering the indirect impact of mass media on the social and cultural environment that surrounds individuals. Past research in the area of public health communication has primarily focused on evaluating the extent to which individual exposure to deliberate communication campaigns is effective in promoting health behavior change

The authors examined the online construction of identity and sexuality in a large sample of conversations from monitored and unmonitored teen chat rooms. More than half of the 583 participants (identified by a distinct screen name) communicated identity information, most frequently gender. In this way, participants compensated for the text-based chat environment by providing information about themselves that would be visible and obvious in face-to-face communication. Sexual themes constituted 5 % of all utterances (1 sexual comment per minute); bad or obscene language constituted 3 % of the sample (1 obscenity every 2 minutes). Participants who self-identified as female produced more implicit sexual communication, participants who self-identified as male produced more explicit sexual communication. The protected environment of monitored chat (hosts who enforce basic behavioral rules) contained an environment with less explicit sexuality and fewer obscenities than the freer environment of unmonitored chat. These differences were attributable both to the monitoring process itself and to the differing populations attracted to each type of chat room (monitored: more participants self-identified as younger and female; unmonitored: more participants self-identified as older and male).

This article explores two hypotheses about how voters encounter information during campaigns. According to the anticipated agreement hypothesis, people prefer to hear about candidates with whom they expect to agree. The ‘‘issue publics’ ’ hypothesis posits that voters choose to encounter information on issues they consider most important personally. We tested both hypotheses by distributing a multimedia CD offering extensive information about George W. Bush and Al Gore to a representative sample of registered voters with personal computers and home Internet connections during the closing weeks of the 2000 campaign. Exposure to information was measured by tracking individuals ’ use of the CD. The evidence provided strong support for the issue public hypothesis and partial support for the anticipated agreement hypothesis. Republicans and conservatives preferred to access information about George Bush, but Democrats and liberals did not prefer information about Vice President Gore. No interactions appeared between these two forms of selective exposure. Classical theories of democracy presume that citizensarereasonablywellinformedaboutpublic affairs. Revisionist accounts, while acknowledging that most citizens fall short of the democratic ideal, still presume some minimal level of exposure to political information. The question of just how much exposure occurs is relevant to a wide range of scholarship exploring everything from the impact of campaigns on voters ’ level of knowledge about the candidates (see, for

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This paper is concerned with the political communication of opinion through social networks. Attention focuses on opinion variance within populations and networks, and how this variance affects communication among individuals. Particularly in the context of ambiguous patterns of communication between individuals, people may experience difficulty in forming judgments regarding the opinions of others. In these situations, environmental priors become useful devices for forming judgments regarding the opinions of other individuals. The problem that arises is related to the utility of these environmental priors when discord rather than unanimity characterizes the contextual distribution of opinion. The paper’s argument is that discussions among citizens are most enlightening when surrounding opinion is marked by higher levels of disagreement. The paper’s analyses are based on data taken from the 1996 Indianapolis-St. Louis study.

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The challenges of dealing with newcomers In the face of inevitable turnover, every online community must incorporate successive generations of newcomers to survive. Without replacing members who leave, a community will eventually wither away. Newcomers can also be a source of innovation, new ideas and work procedures or other resources that the group needs. However, attracting newcomers and incorporating them into an existing community can be a difficult endeavor. Newcomers have not yet developed the commitment to the group felt by old-timers. As a result, they are very sensitive to the public image a community has and to their own early experiences in it. They may not join or are likely to leave in the face of even minor adversity. They have less motivation to be helpful to the group or to display good organizational citizenship characteristic of many old-timers (Organ & Ryan, 1995). In addition, for reasons of either ignorance or maliciousness, they may behave in ways that can be harmful to the group. They do not yet know the norms guiding behavior in the group and in their ignorance, may act in ways that offend other group members or otherwise undercut the smooth functioning of the group. For example, when

This paper was written in the immediate aftermath of the 2000 presidential election. While the election itself was without parallel in living memory, the spectacle that followed, namely, the regular appearance of the candidates and their spokespersons on network television to cast their individual “spin ” on breaking events, was utterly predictable. The need to play to the public even spread to the U.S. Supreme Court. The day after their decision in Bush v. Gore, Justice Thomas, in the course of a televised appearance with high school students, claimed that partisanship was irrelevant to the Court’s modus operandi. As Election 2000 well illustrates, there have been fundamental changes to the American political process over the last fifty years. “Media politics ” is now central, while the importance of political institutions traditionally entrusted with organizing and aggregating public preferences (political parties and interest groups) have correspondingly declined in importance. Today, the use-- even manipulation-- of the mass media to promote political objectives is not only standard practice, but in fact is essential to survival.-1- Given the new regime, the study of mass communications has become central to