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Personal online info effects + Texts with "." insincere + Net lessens knowing claims

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New model to show effects of personalizing online information
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...165219.htm

RELEASE: Are your political sensitivities more to the left or to the right? Which candidate are your supporting? Is a particular social policy likely to achieve its goal? With each question, people tend to seek information that confirms their existing opinion or belief while avoiding contrary information.

This is selective exposure, and Internet technologies are likely exacerbating this behavior, according to Ivan Dylko, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University at Buffalo and an expert in political communication and communication technology effects.

"We tend to look for information that confirms our points of view," says Dylko. "It bolsters self-esteem, helps us effectively cope with political information overload, but on the other hand, it means we're minimizing exposure to information that challenges us.

"Technology allows us to customize our online information environment." Dylko has developed a model, published in the journal Communication Theory, which explores customizability's political impact and suggests how the "automatic and consistent inclusion, exclusion and presentation of information" encourages political selective exposure. He has also conducted an experimental study to test his model, the subject of two research papers currently under peer review.

At first glance, selective exposure wouldn't appear to be a product of the information age. Television viewers have historically made these choices. Newspaper readers once had to decide which local paper to read, just as magazine buyers had to choose between Time and Newsweek, for example. The same has been true of what people we chose to talk to and associate with for thousands of years.

But what media consumers did with print and broadcast is not the same process that emerges online, nor is the idea of selective exposure as intuitive as it might seem, with researchers divided on its consequences.

"Scholars disagree about whether the Internet makes us more politically closed minded, or whether it exposes us to more politically diverse points of view," says Dylko. Customizability is what separates past print, broadcast and face-to-face realities from present online communication realities. Users now have an unprecedented amount of information to deal with -- forcing them to be more selective than ever; they have an unprecedented diversity of content choices -- allowing them to find content that matches their beliefs and attitudes more closely than ever; and they have customizability technology providing nearly complete control over the information they receive. "In a two-newspaper town, readers still might look at the rival paper in addition to their favored publication because the newspaper choices were relatively limited, but online readers can find and then spend hours looking only at content that perfectly fits their psychological and political preferences," according to Dylko. Presets on old radio panels or print subscriptions might appear to be customizability's ancestors. But pushing a button or dropping a renewal form in the mail required conscious choices.

Online, the process is automatic, sometimes user driven, but also system driven, often occurring without a user's knowledge -- an idea labeled "filter bubble" and popularized by political activist and Internet entrepreneur Eli Pariser.

Facebook, which 63 percent of its users say serves as a news source, according to Pew Research Center, is built on customizability. Users add and remove friends, events and groups from their environment while the site analyzes all of this activity and determines what personal news cycle to present. Same is true of Twitter and numerous other popular websites.

Customizability has been explored in marketing, information science and educational psychology, but has not been deeply analyzed in political communication. "Technologies often have unintended consequences," Dylko says. "The model published in Communication Theory describes how these customizability technologies, initially designed to help us cope with information overload, lead to detrimental political effects. Specifically, they increase political selective exposure, making us more surrounded with like-minded information and, potentially, making us more politically polarized."



Text messages that end in a period seen as less sincere
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...094229.htm

RELEASE: If you don't want to send the wrong message, watch how you punctuate your texts. Text messages that end with a period are perceived to be less sincere than messages that do not, according to newly published research from Binghamton University.

A team of researchers led by Celia Klin, associate professor of psychology and associate dean at Binghamton University's Harpur College, recruited 126 Binghamton undergraduates, who read a series of exchanges that appeared either as text messages or as handwritten notes. In the 16 experimental exchanges, the sender's message contained a statement followed by an invitation phrased as a question (e.g., Dave gave me his extra tickets. Wanna come?). The receiver's response was an affirmative one-word response (Okay, Sure, Yeah, Yup). There were two versions of each experimental exchange: one in which the receiver's response ended with a period and one in which it did not end with any punctuation. Based on the participants' responses, text messages that ended with a period were rated as less sincere than text messages that did not end with a period.

According to Klin, these results indicate that punctuation influences the perceived meaning of text messages. Even though most of the important social and contextual cues were missing, the sincerity of the short messages was evaluated differently depending on the presence or absence of a period.

"Texting is lacking many of the social cues used in actual face-to-face conversations. When speaking, people easily convey social and emotional information with eye gaze, facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses, and so on," said Klin. "People obviously can't use these mechanisms when they are texting. Thus, it makes sense that texters rely on what they have available to them -- emoticons, deliberate misspellings that mimic speech sounds and, according to our data, punctuation."

In some very recent follow-up work, Klin's team found that a text response with an exclamation mark is interpreted as more, rather than less, sincere.

"That's not surprising, but it broadens our claim," said Klin. "Punctuation is used and understood by texters to convey emotions and other social and pragmatic information. Given that people are wonderfully adept at communicating complex and nuanced information in conversations, it's not surprising that as texting evolves, people are finding ways to convey the same types of information in their texts."



Access to the Internet makes us less willing to say we know things
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...132147.htm

RELEASE: People are less willing to rely on their knowledge and say they know something when they have access to the Internet, suggesting that our connection to the web is affecting how we think.

Professor Evan F. Risko, of the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, led a recent study where the team asked about 100 participants a series of general-knowledge questions, such as naming the capital of France. Participants indicated if they knew the answer or not. For half of the study, participants had access to the Internet. They had to look up the answer when they responded that they did not know the answer. In the other half of the study, participants did not have access to the Internet.

The team found that the people who had access to the web were about 5 per cent more likely to say that they did not know the answer to the question. Furthermore, in some contexts, the people with access to the Internet reported feeling as though they knew less compared to the people without access.

"With the ubiquity of the Internet, we are almost constantly connected to large amounts of information. And when that data is within reach, people seem less likely to rely on their own knowledge," said Professor Risko, Canada Research Chair in Embodied and Embedded Cognition.

In interpreting the results, the researchers speculated that access to the Internet might make it less acceptable to say you know something but are incorrect. It is also possible that participants were more likely to say they didn't know an answer when they had access to the web because online searching offers an opportunity to confirm their answer or resolve their curiosity, and the process of finding out is rewarding.

"Our results suggest that access to the Internet affects the decisions we make about what we know and don't know," said Risko. "We hope this research contributes to our growing understanding of how easy access to massive amounts of information can influence our thinking and behaviour."

David McLean and Amanda Ferguson, research assistants, are co-authors of the study, which appears in the journal, Consciousness and Cognition. Professor Risko plans to further the research in this area by investigating the factors that lead to individuals' reduced willingness to respond when they have access to the web.


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