Inequities in Online Information Seeking for Making Policy Judgments

Aims and central research questions

The proposed project will look at how individuals seek information online to make judgments about actual policy proposals. We will evaluate information-seeking behaviour against the background of dual process models and assert how different strategies affect political knowledge and judgment as measured in the panel survey. Our primary focus is on inter- and intra-individual differences in information processing. To that end, we will eventually encourage respondents to engage in more detailed searches to see how much information-seeking strategies vary by task, psychological motivations, and cognitive abilities. This is theoretically and normatively important as it speaks to the question of whether the propensity to seek and process political information effectively is chronically limited to a small segment of sophisticates or whether even those who usually do not take much interest in political matters could effectively seek and process factual information if motivated to do so.

Background

From the perspective of political inequality research, the different strategies people adopt to seek information for making judgments are relevant in at least two related respects. First, knowledge of political facts is socially stratified (e.g., Converse 2000; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Rasmussen 2016), and the same appears to hold for cognitive abilities and psychological motivations such as the “need for cognition” and the “need to evaluate” (e.g., David 2009; Redlawsk 2004). Second, uninformed political reasoning may entail choices against one’s interest and may thus have adverse consequences for political representation through elections (e.g., Achen and Bartels 2017; Lau and Redlawsk 2001).

Methods

Our research design is our three-pronged approach that combines: (i) unobtrusive measurement of individuals’ information consumption and seeking behaviour on the Web, (ii) surveys that measure their social characteristics, psychological attributes, political predispositions, and knowledge and opinions on policy issues, and (iii) experimental tasks that incentivise them to search information online to arrive at judgements on specific policy proposals. Building upon this combination of data sources, our study design consists of two phases. For the first phase, we will design a survey to measure individuals’ political predispositions, knowledge, opinions and preferences in our pre-selected policy areas. The second phase would consist of designing intervention tasks to assess how information seeking affects judgments about policy proposals.

Literature

The project is envisioned to generate outcomes of interest to a wide range of stakeholders – the scientific community, general public, practitioners and policymakers interested in promoting political knowledge and sound judgements about policy proposals. Our academic contributions will be threefold. First, we anticipate at least two publications in high-impact public venues (such as PNAS or Nature Human Behavior) or field journals (e.g., Political Communication, Political Psychology), with the first focusing on inequities in online information consumption behaviour and political knowledge and the latter on inequities in online information seeking and judgements on policy proposals. Second, we will make our curated lists of labelled data and anonymised web browsing data available for research purposes to remove the entry barrier for researchers who cannot afford such expensive data. Finally, we will also make our methods and language models available to the scientific community to spur further research and provide tools for German language analysis, which is relatively under-resourced compared to English. For the members of the public, we will publish a tool to aid in the self-assessment of information-seeking patterns (for instance, in the form of a browser plugin) that can help raise users’ awareness of their seeking strategies and signal to the user if they are at risk of diminished judgment capabilities based on our findings. Lastly, for the practitioners and policymakers, our results will help to inform the design of strategies and information campaigns for promoting political knowledge and more sound judgments on policy proposals while decreasing the inequities amongst individuals.

Discipline(s)

Politics and Public Administration / Computer Science/ Philosophy

Starting date

September 2022

Partners

Respondi AG