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Chapter 6. Conclusion and Contribution
As social media has become deeply intertwined with people’s daily lives, it transformed the way people process information and stimulated their opinion expression. Since SNSs provided an online forum for diverse information exposure, individuals have more opportunities to access attitude challenging viewpoints and to discuss with others (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). As a result, social media played an increasingly crucial role in communicating social issues and in facilitating attitude formation. The current study investigated the association between heterogeneous information exposure and attitude certainty on controversial social issues. The indirect effect of heterogeneous discussion and the moderating role of selective avoidance on SNS were also examined.
The results indicated that heterogeneous information exposure on SNS was positively associated with attitude certainty towards controversial social issues. Besides, the direct effect of heterogeneous information exposure on attitude certainty was also moderated by selective avoidance behavior. Nevertheless, heterogeneous discussion failed to mediate the relationship between heterogeneous information exposure and attitude certainty. Neither did selective avoidance moderate the relationship between heterogeneous information exposure and attitude certainty through heterogeneous discussion mediation.
The findings highlighted the important implications from two aspects. First, prior research stated that the increase of attitude certainty would lead to selective exposure (Knobloch-Westerwick &Meng, 2009); however, the current study explored attitude certainty from the perspective of being exposed to heterogeneous information antecedently. The result evidenced that heterogeneous information exposure was
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positively related to attitude certainty. When individuals were exposed to heterogeneous information and viewpoints, their attitude certainty was thus increased.
Aside from the filtering function of SNS algorithms and individuals’ instinct to eliminate psychological conflicts, it was in line with the reviews (Frey, 1986; Sears &
Freedman, 1967) and recent studies (Garrett, 2009; Jang, 2014). Though individuals tended to seek out consistent information, as Table 3 suggested, they did not completely avoid dissonant information. In the era when people are bombarded by enormous information, the result underlined the substantial influence of heterogeneous information exposure on attitude certainty. Without filtering out encounters with challenging perspectives, the greater amount of the information received will increase the attitude certainty on controversial issues. As social media platform has emerged as a crucial forum for public affairs, an increasing amount of social organizations used it to declare their opinion and communicate with the other side. Therefore, it is beneficial for social groups to trace public attitude tendency on social issues for planning advocacy strategies in the future.
Second, most previous research explored the predictors of selective avoidance and how it would lead to attitude extremity (Jang, 2014; John & Gvirsman, 2015; Yoo, Ng
& Johnson, 2018). In contrast, this study brought up critical insights by examining how selective avoidance interacted with the effects of heterogeneous information exposure on attitude certainty and expanded the research scope of selective avoidance.
The interaction indicated that the association between heterogeneous information exposure on SNS and attitude certainty towards controversial social issues tends to be stronger when the level of selective avoidance is low than when it is high. This finding resonated with the cognitive dissonance theory. When individuals confront attitudinal
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disagreements, one type of person chooses to ignore the ambivalent or challenging information and perform a high-level selective avoidance to reach a cognitive balance.
In this way, the interaction of heterogeneous information exposure and selective avoidance on attitude certainty remains insignificant. On the contrary, as for the participants performing low selective avoidance behaviors, heterogeneous information exposure stimulates them to develop a more certain attitude. Theoretically, the other type of people reviews information from both sides when encountering attitude challenging viewpoints. Rather than perform selective avoidance behaviors, they recognize and rationalize the inconsistent positions to prevent themselves from going through psychological conflicts.
The findings shed light on the cognitive dissonance theory and stressed the moderating role of selective avoidance. According to Festinger’s theory (1957), selective exposure to information will be fostered when individuals encounter cognitive dissonance. Selective exposure is proposed as a way to eliminate uncomfortable arousal.
When dissonance occurs, individuals tend to seek information that reduces psychological conflicts and avoids what will exacerbate them. Drawing from the result, heterogeneous information exposure was found to positively relate to attitude certainty.
It can be assumed that cognitive dissonance occurred when individuals were confronted with divergent viewpoints. To reduce the dissonance, they either seek out attitude consistent information or rationalize both sides of perspectives, and then come out with a more specific attitude. In this way, cognitive dissonance caused by heterogeneous information can be speculated to lead to individuals’ selective behaviors, further enhancing their attitude certainty toward issues. The findings extended the effect of cognitive dissonance theory in the social media environment and how it facilitates the change of attitude certainty.
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Individuals’ selective avoidance of social media can transform a heterogeneous environment into a personalized social network, where it barely hears others’ voices (Zhu, Skoric & Shen, 2017). The finding was coherent that when selective avoidance is high, the effect of heterogeneous information exposure on attitude certainty is not significant. If individuals constantly avoid attitude challenging others, exposure to heterogeneous information is likely to have no effect on swaying people’s attitude certainty. Eventually, selective avoidance of SNSs can internalize the polarization into personal networks, thus intensifying fragmentation (Skoric, Zhu & Lin, 2018).
Nevertheless, the current study demonstrated the moderating effect of low selective avoidance. When individuals perform less selective avoidance on SNSs, the larger heterogeneous information they receive, the more certain people hold on to an attitude of controversial social issues. To ensure the effect of heterogeneous information exposure on attitude certainty, it is necessary to be aware of individuals’ selective avoidance behaviors. This study provided empirical evidence of selective avoidance’s moderating effect on heterogeneous information exposure and attitude certainty, which would enlighten future research on reducing selective avoidance while conveying diverse information, especially on controversial topics.
In sum, as a democratic society with freedom of speech, Taiwan has empowered citizens to launch discussions and formulate their understanding of public affairs and social issues. Various social issues have been widely conveyed and rigorously discussed over social media platforms. Information exposure with different perspectives, especially the attitude challenging ones, are profoundly necessary to a more tolerant society and deliberative democracy (Garrett, 2006). Exposure to information that is only consistent with individuals’ beliefs limits the possibility of expanding understanding of dissimilar attitudes. Citizens’ attitudes toward public
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affairs will become more polarized, resulting in a more fragmented society (Sunstein, 2002). The main finding of this study demonstrated that heterogeneous information exposure was positively associated with attitude certainty. Therefore, when individuals are exposed to more diverse information, the higher the attitude certainty they will have towards controversial issues.
Since persuasive messages and information can be a solution to reconcile attitude extremity (Tormala et al., 2006; Ryffel, 2014), it is noteworthy for governors and social organizations to communicate controversial topics through SNSs. Past studies pointed out that “Persuasion is effective when it reaches a relevant dimension of an attitude”
(Ryffel, 2014). When individuals are confronted with the persuasive appeal matching their attitude base, the attitude change appears greater in the intended direction (Mayer
& Tormala, 2010). Given that people who are more certain about their attitudes have a higher possibility of acting on those attitudes, it might infer that those people are prone to be mobilized by future persuasive information (Brannon, Tagler & Eagly, 2007;
Clarkson et al., 2008). Nonetheless, the findings pointed out that when it comes to controversial social issues, individuals who perform high-level selective avoidance failed to moderate the effect of heterogeneous information exposure on attitude certainty. Since overcoming the barriers of selective exposure is challenging for communicators, the findings offered some practical implications in the Taiwanese context. On the other hand, interpersonal communication such as cross-cutting discussion has been emphasized on influencing attitude and behaviors; however, it did not mediate the association between heterogeneous information exposure and attitude certainty in this study. The mediation of heterogeneous discussion did not make any difference through the moderation of selective avoidance either. Some limitations need
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to be taken into consideration in future studies.
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