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7 - Biased Inference from END Interactions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2018

Jaime E. Settle
Affiliation:
College of William and Mary, Virginia
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Summary

For Americans who choose to ignore politics, Facebook provides the necessary content and context to distort perspectives of the political landscape. The News Feed is an ideal platform to foster biased processing of the characteristics of the political out-group, and END interactions provide fertile ground for the mechanisms of social identity theory. Facebook users’ interpretation of others’ political views is neither perfectly accurate, particularly well-differentiated, nor free from systematic error. Three cognitive biases in particular shape Facebook users’ political inferences: the outgroup homogeneity effect, perceived polarization, and the false consensus effect. Despite the fact that most Americans have moderate ideological opinions, Facebook users believe that there are vast differences between the two parties and their adherents. People attribute extreme and overly consistent ideological views to anonymous users based on their posted content, and they think the friends of people with whom they disagree are more extreme than their own friends. These misperceptions are strongest among those who use Facebook most frequently. Additionally, the informational cues prolific on Facebook content facilitate biased estimates about the size of the political in-group that reinforce users’ political identities when they receive social feedback on the content they’ve posted.
Type
Chapter
Information
Frenemies
How Social Media Polarizes America
, pp. 161 - 196
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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