{"title":"The underlying mechanisms of the persuasiveness of different types of satirical news messages.","authors":"Ellen Droog, Christian Burgers","doi":"10.1080/0163853X.2024.2381407","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Research into the persuasiveness of satirical news has found mixed results. Two possible explanations lie in the lack of clarity about mechanisms underlying the influence of consuming different types of satirical content. In six experiments (<i>N<sub>total</sub></i> = 3,139), we investigated how (different types of) humorous versus nonhumorous (satirical) messages influenced recipients' cognitive, emotional, and excitative responses and how these responses in turn influenced their attitudes. Results show that attitudes were influenced through recipients' cognitive and emotional reactions to the stimuli but in opposite directions. This suppressed an overall effect on attitudes: Consuming humorous satirical messages led to more message-agreement because the messages were more humorous, and recipients felt less angry, while this consumption led to less message-agreement because the messages were discounted more, and recipients felt less worried. Our results highlight the importance of distinguishing between different types of satirical news content (humorous vs. nonhumorous) when studying satire's persuasiveness.</p>","PeriodicalId":11316,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Processes","volume":"61 10","pages":"479-497"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11614037/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Discourse Processes","FirstCategoryId":"102","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2024.2381407","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2024/1/1 0:00:00","PubModel":"eCollection","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"PSYCHOLOGY, EDUCATIONAL","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Research into the persuasiveness of satirical news has found mixed results. Two possible explanations lie in the lack of clarity about mechanisms underlying the influence of consuming different types of satirical content. In six experiments (Ntotal = 3,139), we investigated how (different types of) humorous versus nonhumorous (satirical) messages influenced recipients' cognitive, emotional, and excitative responses and how these responses in turn influenced their attitudes. Results show that attitudes were influenced through recipients' cognitive and emotional reactions to the stimuli but in opposite directions. This suppressed an overall effect on attitudes: Consuming humorous satirical messages led to more message-agreement because the messages were more humorous, and recipients felt less angry, while this consumption led to less message-agreement because the messages were discounted more, and recipients felt less worried. Our results highlight the importance of distinguishing between different types of satirical news content (humorous vs. nonhumorous) when studying satire's persuasiveness.
期刊介绍:
Discourse Processes is a multidisciplinary journal providing a forum for cross-fertilization of ideas from diverse disciplines sharing a common interest in discourse--prose comprehension and recall, dialogue analysis, text grammar construction, computer simulation of natural language, cross-cultural comparisons of communicative competence, or related topics. The problems posed by multisentence contexts and the methods required to investigate them, although not always unique to discourse, are sufficiently distinct so as to require an organized mode of scientific interaction made possible through the journal.