Newman Todd P, Nisbet Erik C, Nisbet Matthew C
University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.
The Ohio State University, USA.
Public Underst Sci. 2018 Nov;27(8):985-1002. doi: 10.1177/0963662518801170. Epub 2018 Sep 26.
According to cultural cognition theory, individuals hold opinions about politically contested issues like climate change that are consistent with their "cultural way of life," conforming their opinions to how they think society should be organized and to what they perceive are the attitudes of their cultural peers. Yet despite dozens of cultural cognition studies, none have directly examined the role of the news media in facilitating these differential interpretations. To address this gap, drawing on a national survey of US adults administered in 2015, we statistically modeled the cultural cognition process in relation to news choices and media effects on public attitudes about climate change. Individuals possessing strongly held cultural worldviews, our findings show, not only choose news outlets where they expect to find culturally congruent arguments about climate change, but they also selectively process the arguments they encounter. Overall, our study demonstrates the substantial role that cultural cognition in combination with news media choices play in contributing to opinion polarization on climate change and other politicized science topics.
根据文化认知理论，个人对气候变化等政治争议问题持有与他们“文化生活方式”一致的观点，使他们的观点符合他们对社会应如何组织的看法以及他们所认为的文化同侪的态度。然而，尽管有几十项文化认知研究，但没有一项直接考察新闻媒体在促成这些不同解读方面的作用。为了填补这一空白，我们利用2015年对美国成年人进行的全国性调查，对与新闻选择以及媒体对公众气候变化态度的影响相关的文化认知过程进行了统计建模。我们的研究结果表明，拥有强烈文化世界观的个人不仅会选择他们期望能找到与气候变化文化相符论点的新闻媒体，而且还会有选择地处理他们遇到的论点。总体而言，我们的研究表明，文化认知与新闻媒体选择相结合在导致气候变化及其他政治化科学话题的观点两极分化方面发挥了重要作用。
