Conservative Bias Research Articles

Self-fulfilling Prophecy and Muslim Radicalization: Cases of France and the United States

This paper investigates the relationship between radicalization and self-fulfilling prophecy, focusing on the Western contexts with case studies from France and the United States. In France, historical marginalization and "symbolic ghettoization" of Muslim immigrants created an "in-group" versus "out-group" dynamic, intensified by political actions and media portrayals, leading to alienation and radicalization among young Muslim men. Similarly, in the United States, conservative media narratives post-9/11 have portrayed Muslims as threats, influencing public opinion and policy decisions, and setting the stage for potential future radicalization. The paper emphasizes the formation of these restrictive identities pushes marginalized individuals towards radicalism, underscoring the need to reject prejudices for effective radicalization mitigation. It warns of the dangers of symbolic segregation, highlighting the importance of understanding and addressing self-fulfilling prophecies in political and media discourse to combat radicalization in contemporary societies.

The Politicization of Climate Science: Media Consumption, Perceptions of Science and Scientists, and Support for Policy

Differential media treatment of climate change, including conservative media’s tendency to reject the anthropogenic climate change scientific consensus, has reinforced polarized perceptions of climate change. Studies have found differences in coverage patterns and in perceptions among those relying more heavily on conservative rather than liberal or moderate media. This scholarship has been limited by narrow measurements of media exposure, climate-related outcomes, and the mechanism of effects. We analyzed nationally representative US data (N = 1,181) using measures that included not only reported use of mainstream print, cable, and social media captured in past research, but also science programming, as well as far-right, alternative-health, and Christian media. On average, participants relied more heavily on centrist and liberal media, followed by Fox News and social media. The results corroborate findings associating exposure to centrist media with pro-climate attitudes, and conservative media, including Fox News with the opposite views. Use of far-right outlets was associated with the lowest levels of belief in anthropogenic climate change, perceptions of personal threat, and support for climate-friendly policy. Reliance on science media was associated with pro-climate views. Most associations were mediated via perceptions of science and scientists (using the Factors Associated with Self-Presentation of Science, FASS scale).

Evangelicals and global warming

AbstractEvangelicals have long been suspicious of scientific expertise. About 60% of evangelicals, a group which makes up approximately one‐third of the US population, reject climate change. Many evangelicals allow the Bible to take precedence over science. Various non‐scientific factors contribute to this pervasive skepticism. This paper lists several social and cultural factors that contribute to evangelical concerns, including religion, politics, education, and conservative media. The paper ends on a positive note, pointing out that young evangelicals are taking the lead in getting the word out, lobbying climate‐denying politicians and educators, in addition to contacting young people in universities, places of worship, and through social media, sharing information about climate change with their peers, with the clear advantage of being from the same faith community. As a group, evangelicals present a formidable challenge to effectively dealing with global warming, but a few glimmers of hope are beginning to emerge.

Threats, victims, or heroes? Media frames about migration in the United Kingdom and Brazil

Conservative media often frames migrants negatively, echoing discourses of othering driven by populist leaders. Previous studies have examined the intersections between media framing, migration, and populism, but comparative studies on migration framing including Brazil remain scarce. This study uses quantitative content analysis to explore media frames of news items published in the United Kingdom and Brazil. It aims to contribute new insights regarding migration media framing by comparing conservative news coverage of two countries that experienced a rise in populism wave in the last years. We found that new items in both countries tended to frame migration in similar ways, suggesting a pattern in two different contexts. Findings show the prevalence of negative framing over positive framing, with significant differences for victim frames, and non-significant differences for hero and threat frames. This study contributes by providing new insights into the intersections between media framing, migration, and populism.

Does news literacy help combat misinformation? The interplay of news literacy, political ideology, and ideological media use on COVID-19 misperceptions

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic heightened the urgency of working across lines of political difference to combat misinformation. This paper asks: Does having news literacy matter in reducing misperceptions, and importantly, for whom does having news literacy matter? Using a national survey of US adults (N = 1700) that included the largest set of COVID-19-related misperceptions examined to date (k = 84), we tested how the effects of news literacy on misperceptions vary across ideology and ideological media consumption. Although holding a higher level of news literacy is associated with fewer misperceptions in general, it helps conservatives less than it helps liberals. Moreover, although news literacy is associated with mitigating the misperception-inducing effect of ideological media consumption on both ends of the political spectrum, this potential benefit appears to be weaker for conservative media use than for liberal media use. Finally, the benefit of having news literacy is maximized among cross-cutting consumers of ideological media but dampened among like-minded consumers, particularly conservatives with heavy conservative media consumption. We discuss the implications of our findings for identifying subgroups for future news literacy interventions and understanding the potentials and challenges of using news literacy to combat misinformation in a polarized climate.

Audience engagement in outrage factors embedded in COVID‐19 news: A content analysis of South Korean news articles and reader comments

AbstractThe risk perception of lay people is believed to be guided by qualitative characteristics of risk they perceive. Outrage factors refer to perceived characteristics of risk that arouse emotional responses and thereby influence risk perception. Conducting a content analysis of coronavirus disease 2019 online news coverage, we identified outrage factors embedded in news stories to determine how those factors are associated with audience engagement, measured by counting news consumer comments and clicks on emotional expressions on each news story. As a result, the average outrage score for a news story was significantly associated with the number of clicks on emotional expressions and comments. When it comes to individual outrage factors, a news story covering a case of violation against social distancing or other governmental guidelines was found to be accompanied by more comments and more emotional expressions, indicating the strongest power of moral nature. The outrage factor of voluntariness, human origin, accident history and controllability were also associated with one or both types of the audience responses. The news stories of business owners who involuntarily shut down their businesses or those comparing the current pandemic to Middle East respiratory syndrome that broke out in 2015 in the nation showed a similar pattern of audience engagement. Furthermore, liberal media were more likely to convey outrage factors than media with a less liberal orientation, which was manifested in the outrage score for each story. We discuss the potential of outrage factors as a new content‐based factor for audience engagement in online risk communication.

The Hero, the White Savior, and the Smuggler: Criminalized Figures in the Landscape of Solidarity Toward Migrants

One recent shift in the ever-expanding crackdown on migration and implementation of a hostile environment for migrants in the EU has been the criminalization of migrant solidarity. Using various legal tools, EU governments have been trying to hinder solidarity actions from civil society. In particular, a narrative depicting civilians helping migrants as criminals has been elaborated by European organizations and strengthened by far-right groups and dominant press outlets. In reaction, a counter-narrative has been constructed and spread by pro-migrant groups and liberal media, which presents criminalized activists as criminalized heroes and their actions as humanitarian. Based on a critical discourse analysis of academic texts, press articles, and empirical research with pro-migrant activists, this article examines two criminal figures from the civilian search and rescue field: the “activist associated with smugglers” and its counterpart, the “criminalized hero.” Through the lens of figuration of crime and social justice, the article brings a new understanding of the de- and repoliticization processes that occur in the field of humanitarian help and migration. By analyzing these two figures, the paper also contributes to a better understanding of the competing moral orders underpinning criminal and social justice claims in the field of solidarity toward migrants. On the one hand, the figure of the activist associated with smuggler is part of a criminal justice narrative depicting migration as a threat to political, social, and economic stability. On the other hand, the criminalized hero figure includes a counter-narrative to this moral order based on the defense of a social justice frame of solidarity and the protection of human rights. Within the pro-migrant activist’s scene, the criminalized hero and its social justice frame are criticized for reproducing racist and post-colonial practices of humanitarianism.

The New Civil Religion

Social scientific studies find that religion plays a limited role in shaping Americans’ climate attitudes. I argue that a major type of religiosity has been missed: that which is expressed in conservative media. This religiosity is not associated with religious institutions but rather takes the form of civil religion. Because the US is now religiously polarized, today’s civil religion differs from what Bellah identified in 1967: rather than serving to unify the entire country, it serves to unify the political right, setting it against what is constructed as the secular left. I show how the religious discourse Rush Limbaugh employed on his radio broadcasts exemplifies this new civil religion, and further, that he used civil religious arguments to denigrate climate action. The new civil religiosity on the right, sometimes called Christian nationalism, reduces support for climate legislation by portraying a powerful federal government as a threat to religious liberty.

Reading ‘between the lines’: How implicit language helps liberal media survive in authoritarian regimes. The Kommersant Telegram posts case study

This case study demonstrates identification, explicitation, and validation of the implicatures found in the Kommersant (Russia) Telegram channel posts. It explores the primary reasons for Kommersant’s implicature use and the language means employed for the creation of the implicature. The contributors to the Kommersant Telegram channel use irony/sarcasm, creative neologisms, wordplay, metaphors, and legally imposed euphemisms for the expression of the implicit meaning. The use of implicatures is mainly motivated by the authors’ desire for self-protection and cooperation. Kommersant’s implicit language also contributes towards the creation of a circle of loyal readers who may enjoy explicitating the implicatures so as to feel they belong to a specific socio-political group. The multi-stage perceptual analysis substantiates the assumption that readers with prior knowledge of Kommersant’s style are more sensitive to its implicatures. The report also concludes that at times of rigid war-time media regulation in Russia, Kommersant’s reporters use a code of implicit expressions as a means to preserve a certain objectivity in their reporting and to maintain their loyal readership.

Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Sonification for Time-series Data Exploration

Astronomy is a discipline primarily reliant on visual data. However, alternative data representation techniques are being explored, in particular “sonification,” namely, the representation of data into sound. While there is increasing interest in the astronomical community in using sonification in research and educational contexts, its full potential is still to be explored. This study measured the performance of astronomers and nonastronomers to detect a transit-like feature in time-series data (i.e., light curves), which were represented visually or auditorily, adopting different data-to-sound mappings. We also assessed the bias that participants exhibited in the different conditions. We simulated the data of 160 light curves with different signal-to-noise ratios. We represented them as visual plots or auditory streams with different sound parameters to represent brightness: pitch, duration, or the redundant duration and pitch. We asked the participants to identify the presence of transit-like features in these four conditions in a session that included an equal number of stimuli with and without transit-like features. With auditory stimuli, participants detected transits with performances above the chance level. However, visual stimuli led to overall better performances compared to auditory stimuli and astronomers outperformed nonastronomers. Visualisations led to a conservative response bias (reluctance to answer “yes, there is a transit”), whereas sonifications led to more liberal responses (proneness to respond “yes, there is a transit”). Overall, this study contributes to understanding how different representations (visual or auditory) and sound mappings (pitch, duration, and duration and pitch) of time-series data affect detection accuracy and biases.

The social anatomy of climate change denial in the United States

Using data from Twitter (now X), this study deploys artificial intelligence (AI) and network analysis to map and profile climate change denialism across the United States. We estimate that 14.8% of Americans do not believe in climate change. This denialism is highest in the central and southern U.S. However, it also persists in clusters within states (e.g., California) where belief in climate change is high. Political affiliation has the strongest correlation, followed by level of education, COVID-19 vaccination rates, carbon intensity of the regional economy, and income. The analysis reveals how a coordinated social media network uses periodic events, such as cold weather and climate conferences, to sow disbelief about climate change and science, in general. Donald Trump was the strongest influencer in this network, followed by conservative media outlets and right-wing activists. As a form of knowledge vulnerability, climate denialism renders communities unprepared to take steps to increase resilience. As with other forms of misinformation, social media companies (e.g., X, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok) should flag accounts that spread falsehoods about climate change and collaborate on targeted educational campaigns.

Perceptual decoupling or trigger happiness: the effect of response delays and shorter presentation times on a go-no-go task with a high go prevalence.

In the current investigation, we modified the high Go, low No-Go Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART). Some researchers argue a commission error, an inappropriate response to a No-Go stimulus, in the SART is due to the participant being inattentive, or perceptually decoupled, during stimulus onset. Response delays in the SART reduce commission errors. A response delay may therefore enable a participant who is initially inattentive to recouple their attention in time to appropriately perceive the stimulus and withhold a response to a No-Go stimulus. However, shortening stimulus display duration in the SART should limit the possibility of the participant identifying the stimulus later, if they are initially not attending the stimulus. A response delay should not reduce commission errors if stimulus duration is kept to the minimum duration enabling stimulus recognition. In two experiments, we shortened stimulus onset to offset duration and added response delays of varying lengths. In both experiments, even when stimulus duration was shortened, response delays notably reduced commission errors if the delay was greater than 250ms. In addition, using the Signal Detection Theory perspective in which errors of commission in the SART are due to a lenient response bias-trigger happiness, we predicted that response delays would result in a shift to a more conservative response bias in both experiments. These predictions were verified. The errors of commission in the SART may not be a measures of conscious awareness per se, but instead indicative of the level of participant trigger happiness-a lenient response bias.

Response bias modulates the confidence‐accuracy relationship for both positive identifications and lineup rejections in a simultaneous lineup task

AbstractIn recent years, the use of calibration analysis and confidence‐accuracy characteristic analysis has revealed the confidence‐accuracy relationship for positive identification (ID) made from a lineup is often strong. At the same time, the confidence‐accuracy relationship for lineup rejections is typically much weaker. Why the relationship is often weak for lineup rejections remains unclear. Here, we report two experiments testing a prediction that follows from signal detection theory. Specifically, this theory predicts that one determinant of the strength of the confidence‐accuracy relationship for both positive IDs and lineup rejections is response bias. Theoretically, inducing a more conservative response bias should weaken the confidence‐accuracy relationship for positive IDs while strengthening it for lineup rejections. The two experiments reported here support this prediction.

The ripple effect of environmental shareholder activism and corporate green innovation: Evidence from Chinese listed companies

This study examines the effect of environmental shareholder activism on corporate green innovation and the underlying mechanism. Our results show that environmental shareholder activism mitigates time-based agency conflict between shareholders and managers and alleviates managerial myopia, consequently leading to an increase of corporate green innovation. Specifically, we find that the positive effect of environmental shareholder activism on green innovation is more pronounced when managerial myopia is more severe, shareholders are willing to monitor corporate governance, and managers are able to learn from investors through high-quality direct interactions. Furthermore, in terms of influencing mechanism, we find that environmental shareholder activism can produce a ripple effect, causing more site visits, news media coverages and internet searches, and these attention pressures can further motive managerial engagement in more green innovation. We also find that firms that increase green innovation following environmental shareholder activism achieve a higher valuation, suggesting that investors make favorable response to firms' sustainable development.

LGBTQ+ faculty, queering health sciences classrooms: student perspectives.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer plus (LGBTQ+) students in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors are more likely to drop out than their cisgender, heterosexual peers despite having equivalent grades and research exposure. It has been demonstrated that a sense of belonging, a very strong predictor of student retention, is low in LGBTQ+-identified STEM undergraduates. It has further been posited that faculty openness and authenticity can enhance a sense of belonging for LGBTQ+ students through the creation of an inclusive classroom culture. The authors of this article, three LGBTQ+-identified faculty in the health sciences department at Boston University, surveyed students enrolled in their courses to elicit student thoughts, feelings, and behaviors regarding the effect of faculty 1) sharing their identity openly in the classroom, and 2) actively working to create open, inclusive dialogue and space in their classrooms. Of 86 student participants across multiple classes, the large majority of students, both LGBTQ+-identified and non-LGBTQ+-identified, described feeling safe, included, and welcomed in the classroom. They described engaging more in peer-to-peer education and felt that instructor authenticity created a safe and inclusive classroom. A minority of LGBTQ+-identified students and non-LGBTQ+-identified students reported feeling unsure of voicing their opinions, for the former related to insecurity about being LGBTQ+ and the latter feeling a liberal bias existed in the classroom. Altogether, these results suggest a positive effect on student sense of belonging when faculty authenticity and intentionality create inclusive classroom environments in the health sciences.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Openness and authenticity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer plus (LGBTQ+)-identified faculty in the health sciences positively affect students by helping them feel seen, welcomed, and included for both students who identify as LGBTQ+ and those who do not. Moreover, faculty openness fostered student action by encouraging them to have peer-to-peer discussions about inclusive language and engage more openly in classroom discussions. Creating academic job security for LGBTQ+-identified faculty to be open can enhance classroom culture, student engagement, and learning.

Farm‐wide interface fatigue loads estimation: A data‐driven approach based on accelerometers

AbstractFatigue has become a major consideration factor in modern offshore wind farms as optimized design codes, and a lack of lifetime reserve has made continuous fatigue life monitoring become an operational concern. In this contribution, we discuss a data‐driven methodology for farm‐wide tower‐transition piece fatigue load estimation. We specifically debate the employment of this methodology in a real‐world farm‐wide setting and the implications of continuous monitoring. With reliable nacelle‐installed accelerometer data at all locations, along with the customary 10‐min supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) statistics and three strain gauge‐instrumented 'fleet‐leaders', we discuss the value of two distinct approaches: use of either fleet‐leader or population‐based data for training a physics‐guided neural network model with a built‐in conservative bias, with the latter taking precedence. In the context of continuous monitoring, we touch on the importance of data imputation, working under the assumption that if data are missing, then its fatigue loads should be modeled as under idling. With this knowledge at hand, we analyzed the errors of the trained model over a period of 9 months, with monthly accumulated errors always kept below . A particular focus was given to performance under high loads, where higher errors were found. The cause for this error was identified as being inherent to the use of 10‐min statistics, but mitigation strategies have been identified. Finally, the farm‐wide results are presented on fatigue load estimation, which allowed to identify outliers, whose behavior we correlated with the operational conditions. Finally, the continuous data‐driven, population‐based approach here presented can serve as a springboard for further lifetime‐based decision‐making.

The filter bubble generated by artificial intelligence algorithms and the network dynamics of collective polarization on YouTube: the case of South Korea

ABSTRACT This study examined the role of the ‘filter bubble,’ an algorithm-mediated YouTube video suggestion system, in political polarization and the presence of echo chamber patterns in public engagement. We examined the mechanism by which automated YouTube recommendations augment selective exposure to ideologically similar content and the network-based dynamics of collective polarization. We collected lists of videos recommended by conservative and progressive news media and the accompanying replies using YouTube application programming interfaces (APIs) embedded in YouTube Data Tools and Webometric Analyst 2.0. The study examined similarities in content of related videos and conversation networks between commenters, as well as the relationships between the videos, channels, and commenters. Almost half of the videos had content similar to the original videos offered by both conservative and progressive news media. The filter bubbles in progressive media were not as strong as those in conservative media. More than 30% of the videos recommended by progressive media were from legacy media, while this figure was 25% for conservative sources. This study has significant implications for reverse engineering studies because it collected data through APIs, which are neutral and can access YouTube servers without logging into individual IDs.

Polarization and reliability of news sources in Wikipedia

PurposeWikipedia's inclusive editorial policy permits unrestricted participation, enabling individuals to contribute and disseminate their expertise while drawing upon a multitude of external sources. News media outlets constitute nearly one-third of all citations within Wikipedia. However, embracing such a radically open approach also poses the challenge of the potential introduction of biased content or viewpoints into Wikipedia. The authors conduct an investigation into the integrity of knowledge within Wikipedia, focusing on the dimensions of source political polarization and trustworthiness. Specifically, the authors delve into the conceivable presence of political polarization within the news media citations on Wikipedia, identify the factors that may influence such polarization within the Wikipedia ecosystem and scrutinize the correlation between political polarization in news media sources and the factual reliability of Wikipedia's content.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conduct a descriptive and regression analysis, relying on Wikipedia Citations, a large-scale open dataset of nearly 30 million citations from English Wikipedia. Additionally, this dataset has been augmented with information obtained from the Media Bias Monitor (MBM) and the Media Bias Fact Check (MBFC).FindingsThe authors find a moderate yet significant liberal bias in the choice of news media sources across Wikipedia. Furthermore, the authors show that this effect persists when accounting for the factual reliability of the news media.Originality/valueThe results contribute to Wikipedia’s knowledge integrity agenda in suggesting that a systematic effort would help to better map potential biases in Wikipedia and find means to strengthen its neutral point of view policy.

United in misperception? How politicians and party electorates assess each other’s policy preferences

For representation to work, voters and politicians need to know each other’s policy preferences. While we know that this may not be the case for voters, a growing body of research shows that politicians also regularly misperceive the position of the public or their party’s electorate. However, the two strands of literature are usually not linked, and there is a lack of studies that analyse the mutual (mis)perceptions of citizens and elites. To fill this gap, this paper uses data from three waves of the German Longitudinal Election Study to compare the mutual perceptions of candidates and their party electorates on the left-right scale and on three policy issues. Three findings are noteworthy: First, candidates are only slightly more accurate than voters. Second, in contrast to previous studies, there is no evidence of a conservative bias among politicians. Third, projection plays an important role in both voters’ and candidates' misperceptions. Where both groups think the others are is strongly influenced by their own preferences.

What is populism anyway? Newspaper representations of populism in Spain and Italy between emptiness and political partisanship

The rise of populism in Europe has been accompanied by increasing use of the term in the media. This has been studied in the European press from the democratic corporatist or liberal media systems, but there is a lack of studies on southern Europe and the polarized pluralist media system. Using a content analysis of newspaper articles, we investigate the journalistic construction of populism in Spain and Italy, two countries belonging to the polarized pluralist media system. Results show that the notion of populism is often negatively connotated but remains quite vague and “empty”. Unlike previous results in northern and western European countries, political partisanship and parallelism play an important role in the use of populism in newspapers.