Looking for relief: Developing an testing the emotion‐regulation explanation of selective exposure to political information

Abstract

Abstract Though selective exposure is immensely important for the functioning of democracy, no consensus exists as to its cause. The most frequently assumed causal explanation is cognitive dissonance avoidance, but direct empirical tests of this explanation are incredibly rare and have generally not been supportive. Furthermore, although cognitive dissonance avoidance concerns regulation of emotional states, this explanation has not yet been integrated with the newest research on emotion‐regulation processes and their role in shaping political attitudes and behavior. I perform such a theoretical integration and derive testable implications of the emotion‐regulation account of the role of cognitive dissonance in shaping selective exposure. I test these together with expectations derived from an alternative explanation (informational utility), in two, original, preregistered survey experiments with 4864 U.S. adults combined. I consistently find support for the emotion‐regulation account in experimental tests and in two out of three observational analyses. The alternative explanation of informational utility finds support in observational analyses, but not in the experimental tests. The study provides the first experimental evidence linking emotion regulation and selective exposure and suggests that people do, indeed, select like‐minded sources to downregulate negative emotion.