Are citizens rational news readers? At the micro-level reflection process of interpreting information from media, citizens are motivated to confirm or disconfirm the given facts based on their prior beliefs, values,... [ view full abstract ]
Are citizens rational news readers? At the micro-level reflection process of interpreting information from media, citizens are motivated to confirm or disconfirm the given facts based on their prior beliefs, values, and identities (Kunda 1990; Taber and Lodge 2006). Despite the potential irrationality in individual cognitive processes, previous studies have commonly measured reputational threats to public agencies using media coverage and conducted content analysis focusing on its valence (positive and negative tones) and salience. Their assumption lies on citizens’ consensus views on the information they read. These studies have explained organizational reputation at the macro-level based on the role of media delivering implicit and explicit cues of organizations and citizens’ judgment (Moar, 2015; Gilad, Maor, and Bloom 2015). However, this kind of approach does not fully explain fragmentary and conflicting attitudes of the public especially due to their cognitive biases in the process of interpreting information.
The theory of motivated reasoning suggests that people tend to lean on their pre-existing beliefs to interpret the information. Political ideology is a heuristic people use when making inferences about political actors, meaning that it would impact their reasoning about government institutions (James and Van Ryzin 2016; Jilke 2017; Lavertu and Moynihan 2013). Many studies have shown that public agencies are associated with divergent political ideologies via their functions, roles, and history (Clinton and Lewis, 2008). Thus, this study assumes citizens are less rational media receiver who evaluate the accurate reputation of federal agencies based on media contents, but their judgments are tied to their political ideologies and the organizations’ political nature. In other words, disconfirmation biases would lead people to be more tolerable to negative information of the agency which their political ideologies are perceived to be shared. For example, liberals would be more likely to believe the good of liberal public agencies.
To test the assumption of motivated political reasoning over agencies’ reputations, this study conducts a survey experiment. This study—recruiting subjects via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (n=150)— first tests the linkage between political ideology and public agencies. The findings show that citizens perceive 15 U.S. federal agencies distinctively on the scale from conservative to liberal. Also, in experimental design, three federal agencies categorized into liberal (EPA), moderate (DOT), and conservative (DOD) which are verified in the previous study. Then, respondents are block randomized into conservative and liberal groups and receive a news article with the name of randomly selected agencies. The treatment is the name of the federal agency representing one of the political ideology groups, and the test is based on comparing the conservative and liberal agencies to moderates. In line with the pilot study’s results suggesting liberals responded more harshly to the reputational threats of the conservative agency, the result is expected to show the existence of motivated political reasoning implying we should be more careful when considering what real public opinion is.
