Motivations and the evening news: The impact of processing goals, affective states, and expertise on evaluations of political actors.

Abstract

This research explored the ways consumption goals, moods, and political expertise may provide motivations for people to process political information in the news media. Prior research has suggested that all of these factors, independently and in concert, can influence how carefully people attend to information and events in their environment. A pair of experiments was conducted that investigated how goals, moods, and expertise help determine whether people engage in careful elaboration of news stories or rely on relatively shallow processing of these messages. A total of 391 University of Michigan students, faculty and staff members participated in the research. In the first experiment subjects were randomly assigned to watch a television news profile of a political candidate with the goal of either forming an evaluation of the person or merely passing a few minutes. All subjects then completed a questionnaire that asked them to report their evaluations of the candidate, to respond to a number of questions about the news report, and to complete a number of other items, including a measure of political expertise. The second experiment repeated these procedures and added a mood induction to the beginning of the study. The results of the first study provide strong evidence that processing goals and political expertise can be powerful determinants of how carefully people process political information in the news. Experts and subjects with evaluation goals were much more likely to process the news story systematically than were novices and subjects with pass-time goals. The second experiment replicated most of these results and uncovered a complex interaction of the three primary variables and political party identification. The data suggest that the combination of factors can provide potent motivations to engage in careful considerations of candidate information. The experiments' limitations and implications for future research are discussed. A central argument made here is that media researchers need to take goals, moods, and expertise into account in future investigations.