Two-sided information flows

Abstract

Until this chapter, I have modeled attitude change as a response to a one-sided stream of communications – for example, the negative effects of Iran–Contra on presidential popularity, or the argument for liberal internationalism in the post–World War II era. Much has been learned about the dynamics of attitude change from this approach because, in many cases, the flow of political communications really is, at least for a time, heavily one-sided. Yet it is rarely completely one-sided over any appreciable length of time. Even amid the Iran–Contra scandal, for example, some Republican senators defended the president, and their remarks may have had some effect in preventing even greater damage to President Reagan's approval ratings. The burden of this chapter is to develop a model that is capable of capturing the effects of two-sided information flows which change public opinion – that is, information flows that consist of both a dominant message pushing much of public opinion in one direction, and a less intense, countervalent message that partly counteracts the effects of the dominant message. Such a model is possible because, as will be shown, dominant and countervalent messages can have different effects in different segments of the population, depending on citizens' political awareness and ideological orientations and on the relative intensities of the two messages. But the larger purpose of this chapter is to integrate the work of earlier chapters into a general statement of the effect on mass opinion of two-sided information flows.