When and How User Comments Affect News Readers’ Personal Opinion: Perceived Public Opinion and Perceived News Position as Mediators

Abstract

Two experiments investigated when and how user comments on news websites affect individuals’ personal opinion. In Study 1 (N = 596), opinion-reinforcing (vs. opinion-challenging) user comments led participants to perceive both (a) public opinion and (b) the news tone to be more congenial to their own position, which induced opinion polarization. When user comments were presented within the news article as direct quotes, however, their influence on perceived public opinion was attenuated, with no corresponding change for perceived news position. Poorer message recall partly accounted for the reduced influence of quoted (vs. as-is) comments, but perceived manipulability did not. In Study 2 (N = 261), those with higher need for cognition (NFC) were more likely to infer public opinion from the user comments in their original form than those quoted in the news, but the opposite was true for low NFCs. Results suggest that neither priming nor consensus heuristic fully explain the effects of user comments on personal opinion.