Group Biases and Motivated Reasoning in Media Consumption: Evidence for Intergroup Polarization
Abstract
Group-based identification provides motivation for displaying ingroup favoritism across one's cognitive faculties. Social identity theory purports that individuals are driven to construe positive self-esteem from ingroup membership, predisposing one to positively differentiate themselves from other relevant social groups (outgroups). In this context, social narratives help sustain, propagate and rationalize the existing intergroup differences, and polarized news outlets become a common carrier of such biased narratives. In the current study, across three experimental studies using the minimal group paradigm, we investigated how individuals are predisposed to preferentially process, believe and enact on intergroup news headlines. Experiment 1 revealed faster processing of positive ingroup news headlines compared to those of positive outgroup news. Experiment 2 introduced news sources varying in reliability (low and high) and found asymmetric believability for the positive and negative intergroup news headlines, favoring ingroup irrespective of source reliability. Finally, in Experiment 3, simulating a sharing and voting task, participants again showed preferential sharing of positive ingroup headlines while withholding more negative ingroup news, and displayed clear voting preference for their minimal ingroup candidates. The study demonstrates how easily individuals are susceptible to biased intergroup news consumption, highlighting the urgency for media literacy in the increasingly polarizing information age.