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ECHO CHAMBER: THE EFFECTS OF CONFIRMATION BIAS ON POLITICAL ATTITUDES

Abstract

Younger generations’ algorithm-driven media consumption allows them to curate the information they encounter, which has consequences for the American political landscape. If less exposed to political activity/information, how do college students decide which candidates/parties to support? As candidates venture into short-form video political advertising, how might young people interpret these brief messages? With little context, do unconscious biases such as sexism influence how a message is received, regardless of the content? The current study examined the impact of implicit gender bias on college students' judgments of political messages. To isolate the influence of gender versus attractiveness, auditory stimuli were utilized rather than video. Brief left-leaning and right-leaning statements were created for each of 10 policy topics (e.g., abortion), and these 20 statements were read by an AI-generated male voice and female voice, for 40 statements total. College students (N = 33) listened to the ideological statements (randomized by topic but counterbalanced by block (gender)) and rated their credibility. Analysis revealed no difference in participants’ credibility ratings based on sex of the voice (p = .915). Participants did, however, strongly differ in their ratings of the ideological position statements, with a general preference for liberal-leaning positions (p<.001, ƞ2 = 0.24). Post hoc analysis revealed a surprising interaction between this effect of ideological stance and participants’ self-reported partisanship, p<.001, ƞ2 = .306. Specifically, while participants identifying as Democrats (n = 16) rated liberal statements as more credible than conservative statements (M difference = 1.35 on a 4-point scale), Republican participants (n = 14) did not show the opposite pattern; instead, they were equally likely to rate left and right leaning statements as credible (M difference = 0.11).

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