Americans spend more time reading political articles that tend to agree with the opinions they hold rather than the ones that challenge their views, say U.S. experts.

The study found that individuals spent 36 per cent more time reading articles that agreed with their viewpoint, and that when people did read controversial opinions, they were challenging that by reading even more material that would coincide with their own pre-existing views. "In general, they don't want their views to be challenged by seriously considering other viewpoints," said a co-author of the report, Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, an associate professor of communication at Ohio State University in Columbus.

For their study, Knobloch-Westerwick in collaboration with former graduate student Jingbo Meng involved 156 undergraduate students from one of the American universities. Unlike previous studies this one did not focus just on a general political party or candidate preferences. Instead it concentrated on specific political topics. In the first of two sessions that have been carried out for the study, all students were asked to express their opinions on four hot-button topics, such as gun control, abortion, health care regulation and the minimum salary. The participants were also asked about thirteen other topics that were used simply to distract students' attention from the fact that the investigators were interested in the above mentioned four issues.

After a month and a half, the participants were invited to take part in a study number two, supposedly not related to the first one. In this case, the experiment was conducted in the computer laboratory, where the experts asked the students to give their viewpoints on a new online magazine. The online magazine featured both pro and con articles on the four topics that the participants were asked about in the session number one. All the articles had headlines that clearly demonstrated what position they were maintaining.

Researchers told the subjects that there was no time for them to read all the articles, and therefore they just had to select which articles they found interesting, as they would normally do with a magazine. The participants were also told that there was no need for them to read the articles from A to Z, and were then given 5 minutes to read. The key for this part of the experiment was that the computers had a software program that was recording which articles the students clicked on and how much time did they spend reading each of them.

The results revealed that subjects clicked on nearly 2 articles that shared their own views, and 1.4 articles that did not coincide with their opinion. The participants were 58 per cent more likely to choose an article that supported their ideas, against the 43 per cent likelihood of selecting an article that went against their beliefs. The next most common choice was reading both views on a given topic. Just very small number of individuals were found to click on articles that did not share their views.

According to the study, people with a stronger party affiliation, conservative political views, and greater interest in politics were the ones who more frequently clicked on articles with opposing viewpoints. We found that people generally chose media messages that reinforced their own preexisting views, said Knobloch-Westerwick, and added that, in general, people do not want their opinions and viewpoints to be challenged by seriously considering other views.

The study results are published in the June 2009 issue of the journal Communication Research.

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