"Good News!" - new article published in the Journal of Media Psychology [14.09.16]
Prof. Dr. Sabine Trepte, Tobias Dienlin and Dr. Josephine Schmitt published their research on the reception of positively valenced news.
International news articles often compare different countries, favoring one country over another. On the basis of this notion, the authors hypothesized that when people read international news articles favoring their own country over another, they would afterwards evaluate their country better than the other country – a tendency referred to as positive distinctiveness in social identity theory (SIT). The authors further hypothesized that when people read international news articles favoring their own country, they would afterwards have better knowledge of the news articles they read. An experiment with two groups (positive vs. negative articles in terms of participants’ own national identity) was conducted in Germany and the US (total N = 364).
When participants read positively valenced news articles, they afterwards showed more positive distinctiveness (e.g., U.S. students believed that the US had a better national educational system than Germany). The authors also found that when German participants read positively valenced news articles, they demonstrated better knowledge of the articles. This effect was not found in the U.S. sample. Overall, the article delivers support for the notion that social identity mechanisms are relevant when it comes to analyzing the effects of news media.
The results were published in the Journal of Media Psychology.
