Selective Exposure: What It Is And How It Affects Our Way Of Thinking
Communication and persuasion processes depend greatly on how and to what degree the message impacts the audience. One of the fundamental variables involved in this process is the exposure, voluntary or involuntary, of the recipient to the message.
It can be defined as selective exposure to the cognitive process that makes us tend to seek, accept and attend to messages that agree with our beliefs and attitudes, avoiding information that calls into question what they believe in.
Below we will look in more depth at this particular form of cognitive bias, in addition to reflecting on whether today, at a time when new technologies have taken away the information monopoly of big brands, this process has been strengthened.
The term selective exposure refers to the tendency of people to expose themselves to information, opinions or media that are ideologically related, or that offer a way of giving information to which the person is a supporter. This information is selected to reinforce pre-existing views and with the intention of avoiding any information contradictory to one’s own opinion or criticism of it.
This idea is closely related to confirmation bias, which is essentially nothing more than seeking information that confirms our position. According to this idea, people, when we are first presented with certain information, dissect it and establish how close or contrary it is to our way of seeing the world. We opt for that which has evidence favorable to what we think, omitting, ignoring or rejecting that which is unfavorable.
Selective exposure It can be related to cognitive dissonance, a concept defined by Leon Festinger , which is the tension or internal disharmony in the system of ideas, beliefs, emotions and, in general, cognitions that the person perceives when they have two thoughts at the same time that are in conflict. The person, who will already have a predetermined position regarding a certain fact or opinion, will continue to search for information that does not make them question their preestablished opinion.
It should be said that if the messages are slightly discrepant with the individual’s previous beliefs but appear to be interesting, novel or useful, the person is likely to voluntarily expose themselves to them and pay attention to them. The more novel the message and the less commitment the recipient has to his or her attitudes on the subject matter, the greater the likelihood of exposing themselves to that information and accepting it
The impact of new technologies
Before the emergence of the Internet into our lives, media such as television channels, radio stations and newspapers were the vehicles through which the general audience received information. People could allow themselves to be manipulated by what a medium said, reflect on what was said on a debate program, change the channel or station or relativize what had been said. Since there was little media on offer, it was very difficult to find a radio program, television channel or newspaper whose ideology or way of seeing things coincided 100% with one’s vision.
Still, there was always the option of watching certain media. Preferences ended up imposing themselves on a day-to-day basis, making each person select more or less consciously the media that they allowed to influence their opinion or, as often happens, that were more or less in sync with what they already thought beforehand. . However, this panorama has weakened over time, only being applicable to elderly people whose main entertainment is analogue.
Nowadays, The appearance of new technologies brought about by the great emergence of the Internet has made it possible for people to have much more information within their reach and, among all that information, it is to be expected that there is something that is extremely coincident with our point of view. As there are more social networks, digital newspapers, YouTube channels and similar platforms, people have a much greater range of information possibilities, allowing us to be more selective than ever.
This idea has been defended by many critics of new technologies. Although the supply of information is much greater and, in principle, it would allow us to have greater ease in expanding our horizons, there are those who maintain that this, in reality, would make us focus even more on our opinion, We would only look for similar media and be more intolerant of opinions that we do not share.
Far from broadening our perspective, the enormous amount of new media would make us take extreme refuge in evidence that confirmed our way of seeing the world, now easily locatable by entering our opinion in the search engine and finding endless media that say exactly the same thing as we think. We have more evidence than ever that we are right and the others are totally wrong or have not been well documented.
The strength of plurality of ideas
While it is true that we have more capacity to select information and we have more facilities to search for personalized content, there is a problem in thinking that selective exposure is more powerful than ever: assuming that people always have a preference for similar information. This is quite debatable, since, really, There are many occasions in which people are interested in points of view different from our own
This phenomenon has been investigated and it does not seem to occur as strongly as one might initially think. In fact, On more than one occasion, people deliberately seek critical information about what they think to get a utilitarian benefit from it For example, if we want to study a career and we had initially opted for psychology, to avoid enrolling in a career that perhaps in the end we may not really like, we will look for opinions that criticize it with objective data, or that recommend other options.
It should also be said that the idea of Selective exposure confers a kind of “superpower” on people: being able to recognize ideologically related media the first time they observe them. It is normal that if we are veteran readers of a newspaper, blog or any other source of information for years we know, more or less, what ideology is behind it. On the other hand, if it is the first time we see them, we will not be able to identify their opinion or ideology as soon as we see them. We will need to be exposed a little more and even investigate other articles, videos or blog posts to have a more general vision.
With new technologies it is much easier to expose yourself to a wide repertoire of opinions, especially thanks to hyperlinks. It is very common for us to pay more attention to the title of an article rather than the newspaper that publishes it, as long as at first glance that title suggests a position radically opposite to ours. By clicking and clicking, we end up very far from the first page we visited, and along the way we have exposed ourselves to the most varied information.
Another interesting aspect of the Internet is that media such as social networks expose their users to other points of view, especially because their own users argue among themselves or make posts/threads commenting on a politically debatable topic. These entries end up being commented on by other users supporters or opponents of what has been said in them, and thus a debate expands that, of course, could not have been possible if there had not been people who had been exposed to content that they did not like and who feel the need to criticize.
