Congenial Public, Contrary Press, and Biased Estimates of the Climate of Opinion

2001/01/01 by A. Günther, Cindy T. Christen, Janice L. Liebhart +1 · 6 citations
Social Sciences · Psychology · #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Behavioral Health and Interventions #Climate Change Communication and Perception #Public opinion #Perception #Reading (process) #Media bias #News media #Social psychology #Political science #Psychology #Politics #Law

paper · doi:10.1086/322846

openalex publication_date 2001/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30

Abstract

This field experiment focused on perceived public opinion about the use of primates in laboratory research. We used this contentious issue to examine the simultaneous effects of three hypothetical ideas-the hostile media perception, the persuasive press inference, and the projection bias-on partisan perceptions of public opinion. Our data supported the projection hypothesis but also confirmed that partisans on each side of the issue judged news articles to be biased in a disagreeable direction relative to judgments of those on the other side. The perception of relatively disagreeable media bias, in turn, influenced perceptions of public opinion. Results supported the hypothesis that people make inferences about the climate of opinion based on their reading of the news, especially the perceived slant of that news.

Citations

• Belief in the law of small numbers.
• The Causes of Hostile Media Judgments
• Partisan Cues and the Media: Information Flows in the 1992 Presidential Election
• Ten years of research on the false-consensus effect: An empirical and theoretical review.
• Public Beliefs About the Beliefs of the Public
• The “false consensus effect”: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes

Cited by

• Broad Reach or Biased Source? Decomposing the Hostile Media Effect
• Is the Media Biased Against Me? A Meta-Analysis of the Hostile Media Effect Research
• Elaboration of the Hostile Media Phenomenon
• The Affective Underpinnings of Hostile Media Perceptions
• Assimilation and Contrast in a Test of the Hostile Media Effect
• Hostile media effect [wikipedia]