Equal opportunities for learning and remembering attitudinally opposing information on the internet

Abstract

Many social issues are spread and developed through the internet. How do individuals process diverse and controversial information when involved in online discussions? To answer this question, we conducted a large-scale, web-based study in which 5,180 Taiwanese individuals were first exposed to public arguments about four widely discussed social issues and were later tested on whether they could recognize these incidentally learned arguments. During argument exposure, the participants gave more consideration to congenial than uncongenial information under an informational context but became more balanced under a discussional context. During argument recognition, the observed confirmation bias did not translate to better memory of congenial information. In fact, we found an overall negative but negligible congeniality effect. Taken together, our findings suggest that attitudinally opposing pieces of information actually have cognitively equal opportunities to be learned and remembered.