Negativity Bias or Backlash: Interaction With Civil and Uncivil Online Political News Content

Abstract

<jats:p> Researchers condemn the effects of news but have only recently turned their attention to determining the extent to which individuals engage with news. Within the context of online uncivil news, the current project investigates whether negativity always increases engagement with news. The results of two experiments demonstrate that civility in the news increased news engagement, especially compared to news with the most incivility. News articles that included multiple types of incivility and news articles that prompted individuals to perceive that an out-group political party was behaving uncivilly discouraged people from engaging with online news. The studies contribute theoretically to negativity bias and incivility research and signal that negativity does not always attract clicks. </jats:p>

Predicting perceptions of incivility across 20 news comment sections

“…Researchers have explored the slipperiness of the concept by investigating variables that influence incivility perceptions . Age (Ben-Porath, 2008), conflict avoidance (Mutz, 2015), personality traits (Kenski et al, 2017), and partisan identity (Mutz, 2015) all seem to influence how people view incivility, and these perceptions may have effects in digital spaces (Muddiman et al, 2017).…”

Political and personality predispositions and topical contexts matter: Effects of uncivil comments on science news engagement intentions

“…This, by itself, may help explain the inconsistencies in prior findings about incivility's impact on participatory behaviors (e.g. Borah, 2011;Jang and Oh, 2016;Muddiman et al, 2020). Data are graphed at mean levels of ideology and one SD above and below that mean.…”

“…While the online environment is strongly marked by its deliberative potential, investigations of whether its embedded incivility promotes or impedes wider democratic goals have had mixed results (e.g. Borah, 2011; Jang and Oh, 2016; Muddiman et al, 2020; Mutz, 2015). Though we did not find direct relationships between incivility and news engagement intentions, our findings that beliefs (ideology) and traits (self-monitoring) can both moderate the link between incivility and behavioral intentions might help to bridge the divide between contradictory prior findings.…”

“…Anderson et al, 2014; Yeo et al, 2019), specifically, by focusing on uncivil discourse in discussions of news about fracking, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology. 1 It is hoped that this approach will enable us to sidestep the confounding communication dynamics that have tended to overpower analyses of online incivility in the contexts of politically divisive matters such as elections (Jang and Oh, 2016) and immigration policy (Borah, 2014; Muddiman et al, 2020). Importantly, more than half of Americans recently named the Internet as their primary source of news stories about science and technology (National Science Board, 2018), despite more than 20% of comments on such stories being classifiable as uncivil (Su, 2016).…”

“…Ho et al, 2011; Knobloch-Westerwick et al, 2015), and that engagement can also vary sharply with issue visibility (e.g. Goidel and Nisbet, 2006; Muddiman et al, 2020), particularly in uncivil environments (Chen, 2017).…”